Felicity Jones: "There's a real punk quality to The Brutalist"

Since then, she’s played Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything — which earned her Golden Globe, BAFTA and Oscar nominations — as well US Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On the Basis of Sex.

Now, in her latest award-tipped film, The Brutalist, she stars as Erzsebet, the wife of Hungarian-Jewish architect Laszlo Toth (played by Adrien Brody), who survives the Holocaust and emigrates to the United States in search of the American Dream.

You started acting very young. Were you driven at that age?

I definitely had an entrepreneurial spirit quite young. I liked achieving things. I like the intellectual stimulation maybe, and the breadth of experience. My parents were so brave in letting me do a TV series when I was 12. I had a great time – we were a group of actresses living in a hotel together – and my parents were open to those opportunities. But I don’t know if I’d do the same with my children…

What did you buy with your first paycheque?

I don’t know if it was my very first, but I do remember spending one of my first paycheques on Alanis Morissette’s album Jagged Little Pill. There was something about the independence that obviously comes from financial success. You’re not beholden to anyone, and that was quite core to me. There is definitely an intersection of business and art in being an actor.

You're from Birmingham — did you ever have a Brummie accent?

I actually didn’t! I grew up speaking RP [received pronunciation] and I remember being really embarrassed and thinking, why can’t we talk like everyone else? Why have we got this different accent? My parents didn’t have strong accents particularly, and my late uncle was a theatre actor and he didn’t have a very strong accent. So, I guess it’s all shaped by what you hear when you are growing up.

Do you think the choices that you make now as an actor are different than when you were younger?

I think having a family [Jones has two young children with her husband, director Charles Guard], there’s far more pressure on your time. So, it has to really count. I think, well, who’s going to see this? Is it just going to be another thing pumped out that no one cares about? What’s the point in doing that?

The Brutalist is a three hours, 35 minutes-long movie about an architect. What made you sign on for that?

There’s a real punk quality to The Brutalist. At the time it was sent I was saying no to so many things. I was thinking, am I ever going to work again? Because I was just not reading great stuff… but with The Brutalist I just knew it was the right thing to do. It was a very easy yes when I read the script. I was moved by it and it was unusually intellectual. I thought it was ideologically interesting.

The film is so long it has an interval. Did you worry that might put people off?

Brevity has almost become boring. I think, strangely, in being old-fashioned, it’s incredibly modern because we’re in a culture where the new is so powerful. There’s something exciting about The Brutalist because it’s so reactionary against what modernity demands of us.

In what other ways does the film speak to our present moment?

I think the film is incredibly timely. The thrust of the film is survival. How do you survive, not just physically, but also with your principles, morals and dreams intact when the world around you wants to take that away? It’s about fleeing fascism into the arms of capitalism, which without a doubt is political.

Your character, Erzsebet, is obviously very different from you, as she's a Hungarian-Jewish woman in a wheelchair. What did you do to get into the role?

The key was just a hard slog of doing the accent over and over again. There was an audio I listened to from the British Library of a woman who’d gone through a similar experience to Erzsebet, but had come to the UK. Increasingly I’ve become fascinated by roles that are different from me and that are maybe subversive in some way, or have some kind of edge to them.

Did you wrestle with the question of whether somebody in a wheelchair should have played the role?

It felt as though because of her physical transformation – at the end we see her standing and confronting [Guy Pearce’s] Van Buren – that it was ok for me, as an able-bodied person, to do.

And finally, when you were preparing to play the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you became friends. Do you have any abiding memories of her?

She had incredible temperance when it came to everything. I think we’re living in a time with such extremes and extremities. She very much believed in the swing of the pendulum – that in politics, things will go from one extreme to the other, and they will find a middle way. I would be intrigued to see what she thinks of where the world is now…

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The Brutalist is released in UK cinemas on Friday 24th January 2024.

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