It took a lot to play Pansy. Dropping the morning run was just the start

Pansy is an angry woman. She is angry with her dentist, angry with the face on the girl at the supermarket checkout, angry with her husband turning the light on as he gets ready for work and angry with anyone who wears knotted yoga pants. Her fury is funny, but it’s a joke that soon turns sour, because Pansy is obviously consumed with an intractably heaving, writhing pain thundering around inside her like the Kraken.

Why that monster is tangled in her gut is the question Hard Truths addresses, but it’s too much for one film to solve. Pansy is the cussed misfit in a clan of Afro-Caribbean Londoners.

“Lots of this stuff is about the world around her and what she imagines people are thinking of her and what she imagines will happen to her,” says Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who brings Pansy to life in an astonishingly raw, abrasive performance.

“She is afraid, so when she goes out, it’s about ‘I’m going to attack you before you attack me’. If she was a dog, she’d be barking at people the whole time.”

Hard Truths is the latest film from Mike Leigh. For 50 years, Leigh has been making films, plays and television plays built around characters he develops individually with his chosen actors, starting with one or two people they know in real life, then building the biography of a new person.

“We are creating these characters on the basis that they are real people,” he says. “We’re putting everything into their lives. You have to spend time – and sometimes quite a while – to get the characters solid enough so then you can get down to the real meat and bones of it, which is the way they relate.”

Pansy is married to browbeaten plumber Curtley (David Webber), whom she blames for the fact that their doughy son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) can’t find a job or friends; both men try to manage their circumstances by saying as little as possible.

Jonathan Livingstone, left, and David Webber play the silent men in Pansy’s life.

Against the backdrop of their judicious silence, Pansy’s primary relationship is with her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser beloved by her clients for her sage advice and cheerful nature; Chantelle is thick as thieves with her own two livewire daughters, Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson).

Jean-Baptiste last worked with Leigh on Secrets and Lies, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996, then garnered five Oscar nominations; she played Hortense, an optician who, having grown up with an adoptive family, is looking for her birth mother. Hard Truths came about, she says, because they had always wanted to work together again, but the cultural landscape had changed in the interim. When the film launched at the Venice Film Festival last year, a number of commentators questioned Leigh’s right to tell the story of a Black family.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin play very different sisters in Hard Truths.

Jean-Baptiste has been forthright in calling out the racism of British film and television in the past; she capitalised on her Oscar recognition by moving to Los Angeles, where she has been working ever since. Being tagged in the culture wars surprises her, but only for a moment. “What about this?” she counters. “This film is about a family, first and foremost. It’s about relationships. It’s about people who are unable to express themselves. It is about really universal subjects.”

Most of all, it is shaped by the Mike Leigh method. “The way in which we work, there is no script,” she says. “There is no scenario you’re given at the beginning of it. You have more agency in this process than you will ever have in your entire career. Every word that comes out of your mouth comes out of your head – and those words are the result of a process of working with him to create an encyclopaedia of information that you can use in an improvisation. And when you improvise, he might say ‘would she maybe say this?’ and you have the choice to say yes or no. I don’t think this can be compared to anything else.”

Mike Leigh has defended his right to tell the story of a Black family.Credit: Getty Images

The famously irascible Leigh gave short shrift in Venice to questions about his right to tell this story; a few months on, he is slightly more circumspect. He had no hesitation in depicting a Jamaican family, he says, because their collaborative approach meant everyone brought ideas on what should be in the kitchen cupboards, what they would eat for Sunday lunch and how they spoke to each other.

“And it’s not such a big deal for me,” he says. “I’ve looked at all sorts of sections of society. I’ve made a film in Northern Ireland about Loyalists and Republicans. I’ve made a play about Greek Australians [Greek Tragedy, commissioned by Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre in 1989]; I did a thing at the National Theatre about Jews. I’ve made all these period films, like Topsy Turvy [about Gilbert and Sullivan] and Peterloo [about the 1819 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Manchester]. So that’s one thing.

“Secondly, having Black characters is not new to me. Thirdly, I raised my kids in North London and there were Black kids in and out of my house all the time. It wasn’t really the expedition to Mars that you’re expecting. Actually, of the ones I’ve listed, the most remote from my own experience was in fact the play in Australia. But, in the end, it was very much my sort of play, about family relationships and tensions, all of that.”

Leigh and Jean-Baptiste conceived Pansy from birth through her courtship with Curtley into the present; they found the house where she might have grown up, took the bus to her school, traced her childhood steps around the neighbourhood. It was a long and intimate association with a bilious person; Jean-Baptiste notes that she still speaks of Pansy in the third person, ensuring there is always daylight between them.

Despite that, she says, she had to suspend her cherished morning run while they were in rehearsal. She realised it pepped her up too much. “I found when I ran and then went to rehearsals, I couldn’t get into it. Because of the endorphins, I felt too good. So I had to give up that burst of good energy. And just her body was very different. I can watch the film now and say ‘bloody hell, that doesn’t even look like me!’”

Most of Jean-Baptiste’s work in the US has been in television, but she still sneaks in elements of the Leigh method; playing an FBI agent in Without a Trace, she would make her character’s shopping list under the table during an interrogation. She knew how much her character had to do that day. “And I’d be writing that list, because much as I respect the FBI, they still have to pick up groceries.”

The question arises why, after he has made 27 successful films, Mike Leigh’s methods haven’t spread further afield. He says he has never been inclined to push his ideas on to anybody else.

“It is other people’s prerogative to work in different ways,” he says. “I don’t want to sound arrogant but you know what: you might say ‘why don’t more painters paint like Leonardo?’ You can try to emulate it, but it’s not just the mechanics of what he’s doing. It’s where it comes from, what motivates it, all of that. In the end, it’s just a feeling about life. Because I don’t make films about films. I make films about life.”

Hard Truths is in cinemas from March 6.

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