Felicity Jones is sifting for gold

Most people my age know Felicity Jones from Chalet Girl — you know, that 2011 rom-com where she plays a working-class snowboarder who falls for a posh boy in the snowy Alps. But my formative Felicity Jones experience? Albatross. When I bring that film up, citing it as one of my teenage favourites, the 41-year-old actor seems genuinely taken aback. “I wasn’t expecting you to say that.” Albatross, also released in 2011, is a winsome indie in which she plays a prim sixth-former whose world is upended by Jessica Brown Findlay’s chain-smoking free spirit. The film positions Brown Findlay as the one to watch, though if Jones’s recent Oscar nomination (her second) is anything to go by, it was her we should have been keeping an eye on.

“Where are you based?” she asks, interested in our Kentish Town office. It’s fairly surreal to have someone so embedded in your teenage years enquire about your workplace, but I manage to conceal any outward expression of that, lifting my laptop to show her the stacks of HUNGER magazines behind me. We’re here to discuss The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s sprawling postwar epic in which Jones stars opposite Adrien Brody. The Pianist actor also earned himself a nod from the Academy for his performance in the film, as has The Brutalist’s cinematography, score and production design, to name just a few of the categories it’s been selected for. It’s also up for best picture — obviously.

Jones sits before me on Zoom looking disarmingly casual. Her hair is slightly awry and she’s got the kind of unaffected presence that makes you forget how many of these interviews she must have done by now. “It’s been pretty nonstop since August,” she confirms. Based on her appearance alone, it would be simple to liken Jones to the ostensible “girl next door”, and though her filmography does contain a few roles of that ilk, the actor seems to be able to enliven each and every one of them. She doesn’t shy away from research, The Brutalist being no exception. Jones saw the “humongous script” for Corbet’s latest feature, which she got a whole “two years before [they] shot it”, as an opportunity to go deep.

“Context is character,” she tells me, somehow making what could sound pretentious feel earnest. “What are the forces upon you that are making you who you are?” She based Erzsébet, a Holocaust survivor rebuilding her life alongside Brody’s architect protagonist, on a woman called Heidi Fischer, who had “a very similar socioeconomic background” and had escaped death in Nazi-occupied Hungary, eventually fleeing to the UK. Erzsébet, she explains, “has very low expectations of other human beings because of her trauma”.

This excerpt was taken from HUNGER Issue 34: Fight Back. Stay tuned for the full story.