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Mike Leigh doesn’t write a script for his incisive, sometimes searing, character studies. Instead, he creates an outline and invites his actors to invent the characters and dialogue that will eventually provide the screenplay. This workshopping usually takes six months, but for HARD TRUTHS, there was not quite half that time. How that affected the outcome was one of the questions I had for Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who plays Pansy, is a woman in pain who expresses her inner turmoil by creating turmoil wherever she goes. Suffering from an unnamed, but searingly acute, mental illness that prevents her from taking any pleasure in life, she spews vitriol of a most pernicious type at everyone with whom she come in contact. Yet, Jean-Baptiste allows us in the audience to Pansy’s pain while not sparing us Pansy’s need to lash out with an aggressiveness that is difficult to watch.
During our conversation on November 20, 2024, she discussed how working with Mike Leigh has and hasn’t changed over the years, the toll playing Pansy took on her, and buying into Mike Leigh’s process no matter where it takes the story.
The film co-stars Michele Austin, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Ana Nelson, and Sophia Brown. It was directed by Mike Leigh with his usual collaborative style of workshopping characters with his actors and shaping the story from here.
Jean-Baptiste’s previous work includes Leigh’s SECRETS AND LIES, for which she was nominated for an Oscar®, THE BOOK OF CLARENCE, writing and performing in AVE AFRIKA when she was a student at RADA, and as a regular on television’s Without A Trace, for which she directed the episode Wanted.
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