In ‘Hard Truths,’ Marianne Jean-Baptiste Reunites with Mike Leigh and Finds the Humanity in Pansy’s Misanthropy

It was the reunion that set the hearts of cinephiles aflutter.

In September, British filmmaker Mike Leigh returned to the silver screen with Hard Truths, starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The film marked the first time the two had worked together since 1996’s Secrets & Lies, the winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the BAFTA for Best British Film. The film also received five Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. Leigh was nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, while Jean Baptiste was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

The reunion is a full-circle moment in quite a few ways. Of course, there is the thrill of two beloved and acclaimed artists working together after nearly three decades apart. There is also the thematic connection that Hard Truths and Secrets & Lies share. In the latter, Jean-Baptiste plays Hortense, a Black optometrist who sets out to find her white birth mother, Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), and finds herself amidst her newfound family’s long-simmering turmoil. In Hard Truths, Jean-Baptiste assumes the role of mother as Pansy, a misanthropic Londoner who wields withering insults like a scythe, hacking through everyone from a grocery store clerk to her family members. While the circumstances and consequences differ, both films speak to the complexities and challenges of motherhood in unvarnished but ruthlessly compelling ways.

For Jean-Baptiste, reuniting with Leigh on Hard Truths was an opportunity to reacquaint herself with a transformative figure in her career and his unique approach to filmmaking. “The first time I worked with him was on a play [It’s a Great Big Shame], three years out of drama school, when you’re very sponge-like and wanting to learn,” Jean-Baptiste recalled. “It solidified how I would approach working for the rest of my career until now. There was this openness where you could just dive off this thing because you know he’s going to catch you. Obviously, that’s not the way everybody else works.”

Central to Leigh’s unique filmmaking style is improvisation, in which the cast and crew build the film from the ground up during rehearsals without a script. “You don’t know what the film is about,” Jean-Baptiste explained. “You don’t know what any of the other characters are doing unless your character would know it. So, you can’t preempt. You can’t decide, ‘I’m going to play it like this,’ or ‘I’m going to play it like that.’ Everything has to be organic and discovered in the moment.”

Jean-Baptiste’s work with Leigh was a reinvigorating exercise in trust. “People work in very different ways and, a lot of times, you’re working with people who like your work and leave you to your own devices. They don’t direct in the traditional sense. They are directing the composition of the shots, and you say, ‘Okay, I’ll fall back on my process or the way I do things.’ So you don’t necessarily trust as easily. Going back to work with Mike, you go, ‘Oh, I can trust you.’ So it’s making that adjustment.”

She agreed with co-star Michele Austin’s assessment of working with Leigh, in which safety was paramount. “You do feel completely safe [with Leigh]. You feel safe because you know he absolutely has to trust you at the same time. He has to trust that when you’re about your character and you’re making decisions for them, they’re not based on vanity or ego. It’s not because I want to look good that I’m making this decision for the character. It’s because that’s what Pansy would do, what Pansy would wear, and how Pansy would sound.”

As a character, Pansy demands the shedding of an actor’s ego and yearning for approval. Jean-Baptiste and Leigh worked together to develop Pansy, with Leigh picking traits from the list of people Jean-Baptiste shared from her own life. “Quite early on, I thought, ‘Oh, all the nice people you’ve eradicated from the list.’” Jean Baptiste recalls. “So Mike was obviously going for somebody a little bit trickier.” Pansy’s trickiness is the personification of the “glass half empty” mindset, where even minor inconveniences provoke a lengthy, often hilarious tirade. On the surface, Pansy is miserable for the sake of being miserable, needling everyone around her, including her loved ones. On a deeper level, Pansy is a deeply wounded woman who is grieving the recent loss of her mother, which also triggers an acknowledgment that her life isn’t what she had hoped it would be, especially her relationships with her husband and her son.

Jean Baptiste sees Pansy’s combative attitude as a defensive response to her and her mother’s complicated relationship. “With a lot of older children, they’re the experiment. The parents are stricter with them. I think there was a lot of responsibility put on Pansy because [her parents’] marriage had broken up. She had to look after her sister and her mum said, ‘You didn’t do that properly.’ Like all human beings, we always remember the negative stuff. And then, to top it all off, Pansy’s the one who finds her mother [after she dies]. So she’s haunted by that image. Everyone else gets to remember her sitting there with a cup of tea, and Pansy gets this image of dead eyes and stiff hands.” 

Pansy’s difficulties with her mother leave her unable to grieve properly. It isn’t until she and her sister Chantelle (Austin) visit their mother’s grave that Pansy taps into her overwhelming loss. According to Jean-Baptiste, Pansy’s grief emerging at the graveside wasn’t planned but rather an organic manifestation during rehearsals. This leads to the film’s centerpiece: the Mother’s Day brunch at Chantelle’s house, where Pansy’s family discovers the depths of her despair for the first time when her son Moses gives her a gift for the first time as an adult.

“When we rehearsed that scene, it evolved very naturally,” Jean-Baptiste explains. “For the first time in the film, she’s quiet. It’s a complete loss of control for Pansy. They had never celebrated Mother’s Day in their house. She had never gotten anything for Mother’s Day. The irony of her getting something, but what she got was something she’s actually afraid of, made her laugh, and through that laughter, it made her cry. It was an act of love, and that’s all she ever wanted from her son.”

Pansy’s breakdown at the Mother’s Day brunch is a release valve, allowing her to unleash a torrent of emotion she had been fighting against. “Pansy’s feeling all that stuff all the time, but she’s covering with other stuff,” Jean Baptiste says. “She’s running away and hiding from it, and for the first time, she’s allowed to let it out.” Jean-Baptiste notes that Pansy’s physical pain, which she complains about throughout the film, is a manifestation of those pent-up emotions. “At the cemetery, she goes, ‘Oh, this is what the pain is.” And there’s a relief of, ‘I can feel this, I can let this out.’”

Taken together, Hard Truths and Secrets & Lies speak to the challenges of balancing womanhood and motherhood, especially when society places unyielding expectations on the latter at the expense of the former. When I asked Jean-Baptiste about those similarities in her work with Leigh, she credited her “bloody brilliant” filmmaker’s interest in highlighting the complexities of the human condition. “Being a mother is so complicated,” Jean-Baptiste says. “There’s this notion of what a mother should be like versus what it is in reality. It’s flawed individuals, in some cases, not knowing what the hell they’re doing, trying to do their best, but still failing.” 

Leigh and Jean-Baptiste’s collective examination of these flawed individuals has resonated with audiences. In a fortnight, Jean-Baptiste received lead acting accolades from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the British Independent Film Awards, among others, and a Best Actress nomination from the Critics Choice Awards. With the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards within reach, Jean-Baptiste is thrilled that an independent film like hers is being championed.

“I can’t even put into words how wonderful [the reaction] is for this little independent film,” Jean-Baptiste says. “It’s something for a little man to go film financiers and say, ‘I’m doing a film, I don’t know what it’s about, nobody from the A-List is in it, and I don’t want you to interfere in any shape or form,’ and to get the money and to make the film he said he was going to make.” She also shares what she’s learned from her film’s involvement in this awards season. “It’s opened my eyes to the fact that there are people out there — writers, journalists, critics — that are championing not only this film but film [in general], films on the festival circuit that never get distribution to be seen by the masses. To be awarded by that community for my work is just incredible. I’m very grateful and very pleased.”

As rewarding as the accolades, including those incoming, are, you sense that the true prize from Hard Truths for Jean-Baptiste was the opportunity to reconnect with Leigh. Recalling her film’s rehearsal process, she says. “You’re just out there swimming in open water. It’s terrifying, but it’s the most exciting, exhilarating, and rewarding experience at the same time.”

Hard Truths is currently in select theaters from Bleecker Street in the U.S. and will go wider this month.

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Brandon Lewis

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