“It’s A Roller-Coaster Ride, Man”: Marianne Jean-Baptiste On Her Oscar-Tipped Performance In Hard Truths

Marianne Jean-Baptiste is a hoot. From the moment the 57-year-old London-born actor arrives for her Vogue shoot, she’s an electric presence, perusing the assembled rail of clothes with visible glee. She slips into a Sacai trench (“This is wicked,” she says, exaggeratedly hunching her shoulder and pouting into the mirror) and then a fuzzy white Schiaparelli coat reminiscent of Tilda Swinton in The Chronicles of Narnia. (“Aslan!” she shouts, arms aloft.)

Once in the make-up chair, she regales the crew with tales of drinking too much whisky and doing karaoke; she weighs in on the spring/summer 2025 shows (“I love Dries – he’s done lots of florals this season though”); has a habit of randomly bursting into song and, later while being photographed, is in a fit of giggles again, bent double as the camera flashes.

I confess: it wasn’t exactly what I expected after seeing her latest character, the raging, exasperated and somewhat ironically named Pansy, star of legendary director Mike Leigh’s new heartbreaking and bitingly hilarious family drama, Hard Truths. It is almost 30 years since Jean-Baptiste and Leigh collaborated on a film – the cult 1996 comedy drama Secrets & Lies, which would see her become the first Black British actress nominated for an Oscar. (Juliette Binoche, who ended up scooping that prize, apparently told her she was robbed.)

“She goes from strength to strength with every part she plays,” the now 81-year-old Leigh tells me over email. “Her imaginative acting, courage, dedication and great sense of humour – she should be celebrated for what she is: one of the great character actors of her generation.”

As Pansy, Jean-Baptiste is a cranky Londoner wreaking havoc at home and across the capital. She’s fuming at her hapless husband, her directionless son and her happy-go-lucky sister, not to mention every shop assistant, doctor, dentist and fellow driver she encounters. She rants about charity workers (“Cheerful, grinning people!”), dogs she sees in the street (“Wearing green booties!”) and a neighbour’s baby (“What does a baby need pockets for? Carrying a knife?”). She unwraps a bouquet with the disgust of someone undertaking a dissection. But beneath Pansy’s rage, often a source of that specific, bleak brand of Mike Leigh comedy, lies severe OCD, anxiety, depression and the grief of having recently lost her mother. “The most important thing is that I didn’t judge her – that I protected her. Miss Pansy, man, what a lady.”

It’s a masterful, all-consuming performance that should secure Jean-Baptiste’s spot in the 2025 awards race. If she were to get another Oscar nod, almost three decades after her first, she’d be only the fifth Black woman to receive multiple nominations, after Whoopi Goldberg, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Angela Bassett.

“It’s really exciting,” Jean-Baptiste admits of all the buzz, when we meet several days earlier in the sunny King’s Cross offices she’s currently using as a base. She’s more low-key today, dressed in a navy jumper, matching shirt and trousers, black brogues, gold hoops and circular, Edna Mode-style glasses, with chunky silver rings that glint in the light whenever she gestures to emphasise her point, and a dark copper crop. (“People would make my hair look like a newsreader – so I just shaved the sides off so they couldn’t,” she says, grinning, of her slicked-back mullet.) But this long overdue recognition was not, of course, the reason she signed on to Hard Truths – it was simply because “nobody but Mike works like that”.

When the pair first discussed the project, over lunch in Los Angeles, where Jean-Baptiste has lived since 2002, there was, as is common with a Mike Leigh film, no initial plot or defined characters. “It didn’t take much convincing though,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘My kids are grown up now. It’ll be an adventure.’”

So she returned to London for three and a half months of rehearsals. To create Pansy, she was tasked with thinking about real people in her life, drawing out traits and details to construct someone entirely new. Then she had to work out every detail of that character’s life: what their childhood was like, where they went to school, what their teacher’s name was, how they felt about their family. “There’s no other job where you have as much agency as an actor, where it is as collaborative. It’s a roller-coaster ride, man.”

On set, she and Leigh worked together to improvise all of Pansy’s dialogue. She helped curate what was in her cupboards (“They brought this hot pepper sauce, and I was like, ‘No, she’d have Encona.’”). She compiled lists of everything her character hates or is scared of. She even went out onto the streets of the capital in character, just to see it through Pansy’s eyes. “She has all these intrusive thoughts,” Jean-Baptiste sighs. “It was tiring at times, heavy and hard to switch off. I just had to go, ‘Oh, shut up.’”

Ultimately, this commitment is what makes Pansy feel so real and why, I expect, following the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, so many audience members told the actor that she reminded them of their grandmothers, aunties, mother-in-laws or sister-in-laws. Jean-Baptiste cracks up at the memory. “I was like, ‘Dude… that’s very specific.’”

Raised in Peckham in the ’70s by an Antiguan carer mother and a St Lucian labourer father, Jean-Baptiste grew up running around their estate, riding bikes and playing rounders with her sister and two brothers. She loved performing too, doing various school theatre workshops until she landed a spot at RADA, where she studied while also working as an usher at the Empire cinema in Leicester Square. “I think it helped that I lived at home still and went back to reality every day, so I didn’t get caught up in the drama of school as much.”

Then came a flurry of stagework, including her first encounter with Leigh, for his 1993 play It’s a Great Big Shame!, before Secrets & Lies paved the way for her to work in the US. Since then, she’s hopped between both sides of the pond, appearing in the likes of Broadchurch, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, Prime Video’s Homecoming, the A24 horror In Fabric and biblical drama The Book of Clarence, though she’s best known for her SAG Award-nominated role as the steely special agent Vivian Johnson across seven seasons of CBS’s Without a Trace.

Jean-Baptiste isn’t sure what’s next, but she’s got plenty on her plate: in LA, where she lives with her British former ballet dancer husband, Evan Williams, and two daughters – one now a director of photography and the other a dancer – she keeps a low profile, spending her days gardening, walking her dogs and making art in her studio in paint-splattered jumpsuits. If her friends, including Angela Bassett and Regina King, can get her out, she’s also partial to a bit of salsa dancing. “Marianne is so full of irrepressible joy and creativity that I’d be completely jealous if I weren’t utterly in love with her as my sister and friend,” Bassett tells me. “When we spend time together we laugh, dance, break into song, eat, drink, cause a stir, travel and talk our heads off for hours and hours. As an actor, she’s always honest, always full of surprises, always bold. I’m beyond myself and filled with pride to see the recognition she’s receiving.”

Over the years, she’s “dodged many a red carpet – I kinda slip down the side”, but when she is photographed, you’re likely to see her in things that are “original, funky, asymmetrical – Yohji Yamamoto, Marni, Issey Miyake”. Those public appearances used to make her “a bit nervous”, and she’s similarly apprehensive about being shot for Vogue. “It’s very cool, but Jesus… I’m kinda like, ‘Wow, really, me?’”

Flash-forward to her photoshoot and she’s clearly having the time of her life on set. Afterwards, as she’s rushing away, she suddenly stops, turns back, kicks up one of her heels and flashes me that mischievous grin one last time. “Darling,” she purrs. “I’ve just made my modelling debut.”

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Hard Truths will be in cinemas from 31 January 2025. Cover look: Trench coat, Sacai. Tricolour gold and diamond earrings, Cartier. Hair: Alfie Sackett. Make-up: Laila Zakaria. Set design: Josh Stovell. Production: The Production Factory