Marianne Jean-Baptiste arrives at\u00a0the rehearsal space\u00a0in \u00a0Southwark, south\u00a0London, and immediately announces that she\u2019s exhausted. It wouldn\u2019t be surprising if nerves were getting the better of her; she\u2019s seven days into a three-week rehearsal period for a new production of Arthur Miller\u2019s All My Sons, which is brutally short by anyone\u2019s standards. Peeling off unnecessary layers of clothes \u2013 it\u2019s not a cold morning \u2013 she says jet lag has been messing with her circadian rhythms since she flew in from Los Angeles 10 days ago. \u201cI woke up at 3.17am and was like: fucking hell, it\u2019s early. I lay there for a while, running lines from the play in my head. Then I thought: \u2018Just get up and marinate the chicken.\u2019 I made some ginger and lemon tea and finally went back to bed at 5.30am \u2013 better to rest and meditate even if I couldn\u2019t sleep.\u201d She was just dropping off when the alarm went off at 7am.<\/p>\n
These days it takes a lot to lure Jean-Baptiste away from her home in Los Angeles, where she has lived with her husband and two daughters full-time since 2003. She loves coming back to her native London to see family and friends, but LA has a slower pace, optimism, a vast ocean \u2013 and, for a long time, it offered better opportunities to work. Her breakthrough role as the optometrist in search of her birth mother in the 1996 Mike Leigh<\/a> film Secrets & Lies brought a Golden Globe nomination and she became the first Black British woman to be nominated for an Academy Award. She memorably played Doreen Lawrence in the 1999 TV movie The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, but then \u2013 nothing much. Most offers of work came from the US.<\/p>\n Between 2002 and 2009, Jean-Baptiste appeared in the American police procedural Without a Trace, but we pretty much didn\u2019t see her again on British TV screens till she turned up as the killer\u2019s defence barrister in the second season of Broadchurch in 2015. If you were lucky, you might have caught her in the National Theatre revival of the James Baldwin play The Amen Corner<\/a> in 2013 or in Debbie Tucker Green\u2019s Hang<\/a> at the Royal Court in London two years later. Then, earlier this year, she returned to the big screen with a bang, finally reuniting with Mike Leigh in Hard Truths<\/a>. Watching her raging, resentful yet blazingly funny performance as Pansy reminded us of exactly what we\u2019ve been missing.<\/p>\n It was a joy to hear that she was returning to the London stage in All My Sons, a play she admired as a student at Rada but has never seen on stage. The drama revolves round the Keller family: the father, Joe, has been falsely exonerated after selling defective plane parts to the US military, leading to the death of 21 American pilots; the mother, Kate, described by Miller as \u201ca woman of uncontrolled inspirations and an overwhelming capacity for love\u201d, is convinced that her son Larry, MIA, is still alive; their other son, Chris, wants to marry Larry\u2019s former girlfriend, Ann. As an exploration of guilt, loyalty, the destructive nature of capitalism and (coincidentally) secrets and lies, it\u2019s as relevant now as when it was first performed on Broadway in 1947.<\/p>\n Yet, when she was sent the offer to play Kate, Jean-Baptiste asked director Ivo van Hove if she could take\u00a0time to consider. \u201cIt\u2019s never easy spending six months away from home,\u201d she says, sipping strong tea. \u201cIt has to be worth not being able to paint, garden, cook, write, walk my dogs. But Ivo is a great director, and it was an opportunity to work with Bryan Cranston, who plays Joe. Bryan worked with Ivo on Network<\/a> at the National Theatre, so we met in LA to discuss the process. He told me that Ivo doesn\u2019t talk much; it\u2019s very instinctive. He works with actors who come in with their ideas about the character, which he then moulds and shapes. Whenever I do theatre, I always end up wondering why I said yes to the terror. It\u2019s delightfully terrifying, though.\u201d<\/p>\n I love the fact that I care so much. If you don\u2019t feel like that, go home. Do something else<\/p>\n Van Hove, who won a Tony award in 2016 for directing Arthur Miller\u2019s A View from the Bridge, was mesmerised by Jean-Baptiste\u2019s performance as Pansy. \u201cHard Truths is a masterpiece,\u201d he tells me. \u201cWhen I saw Marianne doing a merciless impersonation of a woman plagued by demons and in a constant emotional rage, I called our producers and said I found the mother in All My Sons! And I was the luckiest director in the world when she said yes.\u201d<\/p>\n Jean-Baptiste may have a reputation as a brilliant character actor, but she works in an industry that doesn\u2019t always understand how to use its talents. When I spoke to her earlier this year for Hard Truths, she said that she has always had to compromise because there\u2019s a lack of multilayered roles for Black women both in the US and the UK. There was so much buzz around her portrayal of Pansy that an Oscar nomination seemed inevitable, but shortly after we met it turned out that the Academy had other ideas, which infuriated critics both here and Stateside (she was also nominated for a Bafta, losing out to Mikey Madison for Anora).<\/p>\n Sons of the stage \u2026 Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Bryan Cranston. Photograph: Jan Versweyveld<\/p>\n Asked about the snub by Interview magazine, Jean-Baptiste, whose humour is bone-dry, said that \u201cPansy would\u2019ve burned down the Academy building.\u201d Now, Jean-Baptiste is more phlegmatic. Perhaps still frustrated, but certainly not sorry for herself. \u201cI try to avoid the word \u2018should\u2019. Yes, I could have got those nominations and awards. You know what, it might sound flipping sappy, but I\u2019ve had the opportunity to do two films in my life \u2013 Secrets & Lies and Hard Truths \u2013 which prompt people to stop me on the street to say they decided to search for their birth mother or make contact with their sister after 10 years [Pansy has a fractious relationship with her sister Chantelle, played by Michele Austin]. When you get that kind of validation, nothing can touch it.\u201d<\/p>\n Not even an Oscar? \u201cA little gold dolly would be lovely, don\u2019t get me wrong. I grew up on BBC dramas that were about the people and for the people. That\u2019s what Mike does so well.\u201d Jean-Baptiste first worked with Leigh on his 1993 play It\u2019s a Great Big Shame! and says that she would \u201cwork with him again in a heartbeat, for nothing. In fact, I\u2019ll pay him!\u201d They met a few days earlier, in fact, for a natter. \u201cI was talking to him about the play, wondering why they picked me. He said: \u2018Well, that\u2019s obvious, they couldn\u2019t get anyone else.\u2019 That\u2019s our relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n Jean-Baptiste admits that doubt seeps into her mind. Van Hove is known for both his avant-garde productions and a tight rehearsal time of about six weeks, which makes this three-week period for All My Sons feel absurdly short. A week in, Jean-Baptiste is still learning the other actors\u2019 rhythms \u2013 alongside Cranston\u2019s Joe, Paapa Essiedu is Chris and Hayley Squires is Ann \u2013 and sharing her doubt. \u201cI was telling Hayley that I slipped up on one line and was convinced that they\u2019d have a word with me afterwards and tell me that they were thinking of finding someone else to play Kate. She had exactly the same fear! We were laughing about it, but I\u00a0love the fact that I care so much. If you don\u2019t feel like that, go home. Do something else.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n I can cook. Garden. Knit. Sew. I\u2019ve got an insatiable appetite for creativity \u2026 I’ve got to be doing things<\/p>\n The joke is that Jean-Baptiste very easily could do something else. Growing up in Peckham, south London, in the 70s with an Antiguan care-worker mother and a St Lucian labourer father, Jean-Baptiste attended theatre workshops until taking up a place at Rada. She has wanted to act for as long as she can remember, but the truth is that it\u2019s just one of several creative endeavours. She composed the music for the score of Mike Leigh\u2019s 1997 film Career Girls and sings on the soundtrack (Leigh once told me that she has \u201ca beautiful voice\u201d). She is currently writing a script about\u00a0grief, which she \u201chas parked\u201d as All My Sons is infused with grief and she wants all her attention to be on the play.<\/p>\n She also has a studio in her LA garden where she paints. I ask to see some of her work, before briefly panicking that it might be awful and am then stunned when she shows me a portrait of Leigh on her phone \u2013 it\u2019s good enough to hang in the National Portrait Gallery. \u201cI left it in Mike\u2019s trailer in a lovely box as a wrap present at the end of the Hard Truths shoot and he came to me, wild-eyed, saying that it looked just like him. It\u2019s the best compliment I could have got.\u201d<\/p>\n Is there anything else she can do, I ask, half joking. She laughs. \u201cWell \u2026 I can cook. Garden. Knit. Sew. I\u2019ve got an insatiable appetite for creativity. I\u2019m like: I\u2019ve gotta know how to do this! It\u2019s not like a neurotic energy because I\u2019m very laid-back. It\u2019s about greed; I\u2019ve got to be doing things. I signed up for a boot-making course in a technical college in downtown LA and then the bloody pandemic happened. I\u2019m just waiting for a window to sign up again.\u201d<\/p>\n We talk, briefly, about the US. She says that she lives \u201cin a blue bubble where everybody is nice and sane, apart from a few nutters\u201d. She has talked before about the David and Goliath nature of film-making in which indie cinema is the underdog; Trump\u2019s threat to impose 100% tariffs on \u201cany and all movies\u201d made abroad could pretty much destroy indie films.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s rough out there for sure,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to be an artist in this kind of environment. It\u2019s all about the money and the number of likes something gets on social media. I really love it when a director makes a fantastic film, and the next film isn\u2019t so good because they\u2019re trying to do something different. I\u2019m\u00a0not sure the movie industry understands that any\u00a0more.\u201d<\/p>\n For now, Jean-Baptiste is focusing on All My Sons. I\u00a0ask if her friends are all clamouring for tickets and she nods furiously. \u201cOh my God! I\u2019ve got people here, in Europe, in the States, all asking the best date to come. I don\u2019t know! Or they say the play is going to be brilliant. Don\u2019t say that! We don\u2019t know that yet. Pressure. Pressure. Pressure. Fucking hell! But it\u2019s great people want to come.\u201d<\/p>\n I tell her that I can\u2019t wait to see it. \u201cI can\u2019t wait to be in it! Well, I can. I could do with two more weeks of rehearsals. But we did Hard Truths in three months and look how well that turned out. So, you know \u2026 it\u2019s all good!\u201d The sun suddenly streams into the room and Jean-Baptiste smiles.<\/p>\n