Delays to the shoot gave Felicity Jones valuable time to prepare for Brady Corbet’s epic drama The Brutalist. It was a role worth waiting for, she tells Screeen.
It can be frustrating for an actor to commit to a film and then wait years for it to go into production. But for Felicity Jones, the two-year gap between reading Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s screenplay for The Brutalist and shooting the film in Hungary was “fantastic”.
The project had already “been through so much trauma before that point”, she notes; for a while, it was due to star Joel Edgerton, Marion Cotillard, Mark Rylance and Sebastian Stan. Yet Jones knew as soon as she read the script that she wanted to play Erzsebet Toth, a Hungarian Jewish woman whose survival of the Holocaust has come at a physical cost — osteoporosis — and who is the wife of Laszlo Toth, a visionary architect who would ultimately be played by Adrien Brody.
“I thought it was an exquisite piece of writing, almost like a novel in many ways,” she says. “What attracted me was the emotional intricacy in some of the more intimate scenes between Adrien and me. It’s such an unusual way of exploring a power dynamic, exploring trauma and desire and intimacy. I wanted to do something that I’d never done before, something really rigorous and quite testing, and this was definitely new territory.”
Jones signed up in 2021, but delays were caused by scheduling conflicts, the pandemic and the difficulties of financing a three-and-a-half-hour drama about radical mid-20th-century architecture. “In some ways, the market didn’t really want this film to be made,” says Jones. But she made good use of the years before shooting commenced in March 2023.
“I knew it was going to be a huge challenge technically as well as emotionally, and so to have that time to prepare, to master the accent, to speak in Hungarian, to understand the character’s physicality, to have the time to really meditate on the character was vital,” says the actress, speaking to Screen International before a mild controversy erupted over the use of AI software to enhance Brody and Jones’ accents — “just replacing some letters here and there”, according to the film’s Hungarian-speaking editor David Jancso.
One unlikely piece of preparation, says Jones, was studying the work of a particular actor. “I’d been watching a few Anthony Hopkins performances because I felt like, in his Merchant Ivory films, he captured some of the intensity of spirit that Erzsebet has, and the almost Jedi-like quality of focus.
“Also, he brings something quite unconscious to his work that I was interested in exploring in Erzsebet — the idea that you’re not in control of every moment once the take starts. In order to release something unconscious, you have to be incredibly well prepared, and Anthony Hopkins is meticulous and reads scripts over and over and over again. I share a similar approach, in some ways.”
Grand epic
When the seven-week shoot finally got underway in Hungary, the film began to feel less like a beleaguered indie project and more like the grandly ambitious epic that audiences would eventually see when The Brutalist premiered at last September’s Venice Film Festival and was released by A24 in the US in late December (Universal is currently rolling out the film internationally).
“Despite its struggle in being made, the day-to-day filming was incredibly luxurious,” says Jones, “because Brady gave the performances such time and space. I remember thinking that to have the privilege of working with intelligent and complex material like this, which you often get in the theatre and you don’t get so much in film, and to be shooting it on film, did feel like something from another era.”
A significant factor, she adds, is that Corbet “was a child actor, so he’s been on sets so many times that he is comfortable on them, and everybody picks up on that confidence”. This early start in the industry is something Jones and Corbet have in common. Aged 15 in 1998, the UK actress starred in an ITV series adapted from Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch books, and then had a decade-long stint on BBC Radio 4’s farming soap opera The Archers.
She was Oscar-nominated for playing Jane Hawking, the wife of Stephen Hawking, in The Theory Of Everything in 2015, and the following year Rogue One: A Star Wars Story introduced her to the world of Hollywood blockbusters. It is clear that The Brutalist is another cornerstone of her CV. Was she expecting it to be so significant?
“I knew it would be interesting, because of the emotional intensity and intelligence of it,” she says, “but it wasn’t until Venice that we saw the impact it could have. That’s when we suddenly went, ‘Okay, this is actually registering in a way that we didn’t quite expect.’”
Since then, Jones’ performance as Erzsebet has earned her Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe nominations, and the film itself has been an awards season fixture, having secured 10 Oscar and nine Bafta nominations. “We always say, you don’t really think about them until people start talking about them,” she notes of awards, “and then they become very important very quickly! But it has been joyous on this film. Because it’s so uncompromising in its nature, to have it so lauded and to have your peers believe in it does mean a lot.”
Since 2019, Jones has had her own production company, Piecrust Pictures — one more reason why she found herself so appreciative of The Brutalist’s production achievement. “I’m finding that having that early relationship with a writer, and being there at those formative stages, is key to finding complex and nuanced characters,” she says regarding her own producing role. “I love storytelling. I love figuring out what makes a story work and why we care about characters, and putting those stories into the world. It’s proving to be a fruitful new side to my career.”
Upcoming Piecrust projects include a TV series “with F1 and Amazon about a woman who inherits a Formula One team”, and an adaptation of Chris Riddell’s Goth Girl children’s books.
Piecrust productions aside, Jones has just been seen in Sundance-premiering western drama Train Dreams, alongside Joel Edgerton, and has finished shooting Oh. What. Fun., a Christmas ensemble comedy directed by Michael Showalter starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Denis Leary, Jason Schwartzman, Chloë Grace Moretz and Dominic Sessa.
“Someone was asking, ‘What do you do after a film like The Brutalist?’,” she laughs, “and I feel like you have to go in a completely different direction.”
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