Marianne Jean-Baptiste talks HARD TRUTHS, Angry Pansy and Mike Leigh – Pam Grady interviews

In 1996, Marianne Jean-Baptiste broke through in a big way in Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies. She received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role as Hortense, a London optometrist and adoptee, who finds her birth mother, a working-class factory worker played by Brenda Blethyn. The actor soon embarked on a busy career in television with roles in such shows as Without a Trace, Broadchurch, Blindspot, and Training Day. But now she’s reunited with Leigh for Hard Truths, playing Pansy, a chaotic woman who expresses her fears and frustrations in the anger that she unleashes on family and strangers alike. To date, she has garnered a slew of nominations and awards, including winning the Best Lead Performance British Independent Film Award. A second Oscar nomination appears to be in her future as lightning strikes twice in her alliance with Leigh, the master of improvisational cinema.

During a visit to San Francisco for a screening of Hard Truths, Jean-Baptiste sat down to talk about her latest collaboration with Leigh and what went into creating irascible, indelible Pansy.

Pam Grady: It has been nearly 30 years since Secrets and Lies. I assume that Mike Leigh’s methods haven’t changed in the interim and that he still works with actors to create a story from those interactions.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste: It’s pretty much the same. Obviously, we’re older, the two of us. We got tired quicker. But yeah, no, it was very much the same. Started off creating the characters. Worked in isolation with him, you know, then he’d introduce a character to you and, you start building a parallel background together and spread out, obviously, because it was a family, so new members kept being added all the time, and you’d go back and sort of build a history for them.

PG: Talk about creating Patsy’s backstory. She’s such a wild, troubled character.

MJ-B: It was actually quite interesting and fun to create stuff for her, because basically she’s scared of a lot of things, didn’t like a lot of things. So, there would be lists and lists and lists of things she didn’t like. A lot of disappointment, a lot of pain. Working in this way is wonderful, you know, because an actor gets to use so much of their brain doing it. It’s very fulfilling. And then when you actually get to the point whereby you are improvising in scenes, you’re not having to make anything up, because you’ve got it all there. You know where she went to school. You know what bus she took. You know whether she stopped at the sweet shop on her way home. You know what all the Christmases were like, the birthdays. It’s like you’ve got all this whole Rolodex of information that you can always pull on when you’re improvising.

PG: You go from working in isolation to working with the other actor, so Pansy is interacting with her husband, her son Moses, her sister, her nieces. But that’s still rehearsing and then you’re thrown into an actual environment, a house or a store.

MJ-B: Well, that changes things. I mean, when we’re in rehearsals, we have like, mock up spaces, so we work in a huge building, and they sort of like space for a bedroom, a space for a kitchen, etc. So you’ve got the feel of what it would be like we work on what’s called the running condition of their lives. Who gets up first? Does this one make tea? What time does Moses come downstairs? Or does he come down whenever he will? So we, we do all that, and then the last two weeks, when Mike knows what the story is, we move into the actual locations.

Now, quite early on in process, once we know who the characters are and we’re locked into them, we meet with the production designer, the hair and makeup departments, can and we talk about the characters at length, so that they get a feel for who they are. And then we describe their homes and what sort of house they will be living in. So they go off and they do their work, and they come back, and you might get an email with a table in it, and say, ‘Would it be a table like this or that?’ So then, when you get into the actual space and start moving in it, you it feels like home, because you’ve created that space with the production design team.

PG: Did you consider that Pansy might be agoraphobic? So much of her behavior seems motivated by fear that expresses itself as rage.

MJ-B: Absolutely, yeah. She is petrified and going out in the world, so she attacks before she can be attacked.

PG: Can you talk about coming up with the way she wakes up? Because she wakes up in such terror every single time.

MJ-B: She’s an insomniac, so she only usually got a couple hours of sleep, but then something would wake her up, a sound or a person or something. So that’s kind of a running theme for her, you know, which is why she’s so tired and irritable. But it was, I mean, that’s Mike. That’s Mike creating and doing his thing.

PG: This struck me as a story of generational trauma. Pansy suffers from trauma and that’s being pushed onto her son Moses. Do you see it that way.

MJ-B: I think it’s interesting because that trauma – I think we either want to be like our parents, or don’t want to be like our parents. We inherit something that is almost their essence, but then we either replicate it, or we don’t. We do everything we can to not replicate it. And I think probably that’s the case for Moses.

I think Pansy just didn’t believe her mother loved her as much as she loved her younger sister. I think that’s what she she taught herself. She didn’t feel listened to. She felt there was something wrong with her. She knows something’s wrong with that. It’s all masked with the with the hypochondria and all the other sort of stuff. But there’s certainly something wrong, and I think it’s just that misunderstanding.

PG: Is there also a class thing going on? Pansy is working class, so would she even be willing to work out her problems in therapy? Would it occur to her that she could?

MJ-B: I think there’s that. If we even go further back to a small child, a mother divorced, so working and maybe tired, sometimes coming home from work and said, “What? Just go outside and play,” and this kid go, “No, I can’t. I don’t want to. I can’t. I can’t. I’m just not going.” So having to be out in the world, forced out into the world, I think, had an effect on her.

PG: How long does it take to go from your first conversations with Mike until you have a story?

MJ-B: This time it was about five-and-a-half months. Normally it’s nine. I mean, we are giving birth, you know, to whatever story it is.

PG: How do you approach your work? I know there are certain Method actors that go so far into their characters, which sounds like it would be miserable.

MJ-B: Yeah, this isn’t Method. We’re very strict about going in and coming out of character. It’s about transformation, it really is about not playing yourself. It’s about stepping into someone else’s skin and transforming into that person, which is why that character is created with such detail. Every aspect of their life up until that day you see them on screen has been worked out.

PG: I thought, God, she can’t possibly live in that skin all that time.

MJ-B: It was tough. It would be tough during the shoot, it was tough stuff. At the end of the day, it was time for a glass of wine. But, again, it’s so rewarding. How many times do we ever get to play such an in-depth character? Just exploring the human condition, not result based, not sort of dictated to by other people. It’s all about what would authentically and organically happen.

PG: This is only your second film with Mike Leigh as an actor but you also wrote the score for his 1997 film Career Girls. How did that come about?

MJ-B: Well, he knew that I was into music and did music, and I remember talking to him and he asked me if I done musicals. And not really. I mean, I like Sondheim, but other than in drama school, I’d never done a musical. But I wanted to explore film music, because to me, that’s interesting. That’s like writing another character into the film. And I was also interested in the way that the score is used to either help or hinder the story. So, he was like, “Ah, okay, fancy having a go at this” That’s a great director. He’s a fabulous director. But I mean, gosh, I feel really fortunate to have worked with him. And you know, he’s really about being brave and taking risks, and he doesn’t demand stuff of you without giving you a soft place to fall. So you can really trust him.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Marianne Jean-Baptiste won AWFJ’s 2025 EDA Award for Best Actress for her perfromance in Hard Truths.