Felicity Jones on reuniting with Guy Pearce for Oscars contender The Brutalist and defiant roles
Why Neighbours fan Felicity Jones jumped at the chance to work with Guy Pearce again on Oscars-frontrunner The Brutalist, even if his “despicable” role messed with her head.
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Like so many other Brits of her generation, Felicity Jones grew up in the ‘80s obsessed with the Aussie soap opera Neighbours.
“Absolutely – we watched it religiously,” she confirms over Zoom call from London, where she is promoting her new movie and frontrunner for this year’s Best Picture Oscar, The Brutalist.
“I remember though, it was always one of those programs that our parents always thought ‘are they too young to be watching it?’. So, it always had this glamour around it because it was almost a bit illicit to be watching it.”
Never for a moment though, despite starting her professional acting career at the age of 12, did she imagine she’d one day get to work with Guy Pearce, who played spunky Mike Young between 1986 and 1989, not once, but twice.
“The world is a funny place,” chuckles the star of blockbusters including Star Wars: Rogue One and Inferno, who also earned an Oscar nomination for playing Jane Hawking in the 2014 biopic The Theory of Everything.
Jones first appeared with Pearce in the 2013 romantic drama Breathe In, playing an exchange student and a high school teacher who have an illicit affair, and got on like a house on fire. Their professional reunion a decade later came under very different circumstances in the nearly four-hour, dark and brooding drama The Brutalist, but Jones says their existing rapport brought some levity and relief while both were playing very serious and damaged characters.
“Guy and I’ve worked with each other before so it was a joy to come and work together again because I loved working with him,” Jones says.
“We just have such a laugh and especially with something like this. I think we both share a very similar sense of humour and so it was kind of funny.”
This time around though, rather than sharing romance, the pair’s characters had a much frostier relationship. Writer-director Brady Corbett’s The Brutalist, which earlier this month won the Golden Globe for Best Drama, follows celebrated Hungarian-Jewish architect Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody, who is odds-odd on nab his second Best Actor Oscar for the role), after he escapes the Holocaust and attempts to build a new life in America.
Jones and Pearce – who are both also expected to be recognised for their supporting roles when the Oscar nominations are announced this month – play Toth’s steely, wheelchair bound wife Erzsebet and the businessman who takes the architect under his wing, Harrison Lee Van Buren, whose charm, wealth and good looks come with a sense of vast privilege and entitlement, as well as a monstrous dark side.
“It’s a bit strange because he is playing such a horrible part and he’s such a nice person, which he does so well, but it took me a moment to get my head around,” says Jones of Pearce. “I was like ‘but it’s Guy – and he’s so nice – why is he playing this horrible person, this despicable human being’.”
Erzsebet, who is devoted to her husband despite their years apart, his addictions and artistic volatility, and bound to him by their shared trauma, views Van Buren with first with suspicion and then outright loathing after a terrible act committed by the millionaire comes to light. It all builds to an electrifying confrontation, which Jones says was the main reason she signed on to the project.
“It was that final scene,” she confirms, “that final confrontation that she has with Van Buren. I thought it was such a challenge to play a character where you’ve got to get to that point, which is almost quite a superhero moment where she gets to speak truth to the corrupt and the powerful.”
Like Pearce, Jones says The Brutalist was a passion project for all concerned. For a film of its scale and ambition – and length – to attract such a top-shelf cast with a paltry $16 million budget, clearly no one was in it for the money but rather to be part of something that was like nothing they had ever seen before.
At its heart is the unconventional love story between Laszlo and Erzsebet – which Jones describes “beautifully dysfunctional” – but it also digs deep into themes such as artistic drive and ego, the immigrant experience, sexual abuse, power imbalance, rampant capitalism and how the American Dream can be a nightmare for some.
“I hadn’t read anything that had an interval in it before,” says Jones, who first appears in the second half of the film. “I thought it was incredibly engaging and very, very moving. At the time that I was sent the script I was reading so many things and I just couldn’t find anything that I wanted to do.
“It was coming out of the pandemic and I had all these realisations that life has got to have meaning because who knows what’s going to happen and then I read The Brutalist and I thought ‘there we go – that’s something that’s going to be meaningful to do’ and so it was a really easy decision.”
Jones says she was fascinated when she first read the script about what it had to say about the immigrant experience in the US, but had no clue just how relevant that theme would become. As The Brutalist had its world premiere last September at The Venice Film Festival, where Corbet won the Silver Lion award for Best Direction, a fierce and often nasty debate over immigration became a key issue in the presidential election won by Donald Trump.
“What is extraordinary about cinema is that something’s written and then something’s made in a very different time from when it comes out, so you never know how pertinent it’s going to be,” says Jones. “A film can hit the Zeitgeist or it won’t depending on the themes. But I think at the core of it, a film that explores the immigrant experience when so many countries are built through the power of immigrants – but immigrants aren’t recognised – was a fundamental reason for doing it.”
Jones says that she’s always been attracted to characters who have defiance in them – “they are the intellectually and emotionally stimulating roles” – and one that left a deep impact on her was the late, great, trailblazing American Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who she played in the 2018 biographical legal drama On the Basis of Sex.
Jones says she treasured the time she spent with Ginsberg before her death in 2020 and that she sorely misses her “temperate voice” in an increasingly polarised world full of social media misinformation and invective.
“She was a great believer in the swing of the pendulum of politics, and it moves one way and then it moves the other as we often see but I would be fascinated to know what her thoughts would be about where the world is now,” says Jones.
“I think no one could have anticipated the huge technological changes that we’re going through is ultimately why I think it feels like the world is in such enormous flux, and we’re all grappling with it. It’s akin to the invention of the printing press – the smartphone is really revolutionising the world and I think we all feel like we’re hanging on for dear life.”
The Brutalist screens in special previews this weekend, and opens in general release on January 23.
Originally published as Felicity Jones on reuniting with Guy Pearce for Oscars contender The Brutalist and defiant roles
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