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Marianne Jean-Baptiste arrives at the rehearsal space in Southwark, south London, and immediately announces that she’s exhausted. It wouldn’t be surprising if nerves were getting the better of her; she’s seven days into a three-week rehearsal period for a new production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, which is brutally short by anyone’s standards. Peeling off unnecessary layers of clothes – it’s not a cold morning – she says jet lag has been messing with her circadian rhythms since she flew in from Los Angeles 10 days ago. “I woke up at 3.17am and was like: fucking hell, it’s early. I lay there for a while, running lines from the play in my head. Then I thought: ‘Just get up and marinate the chicken.’ I made some ginger and lemon tea and finally went back to bed at 5.30am – better to rest and meditate even if I couldn’t sleep.” She was just dropping off when the alarm went off at 7am.
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 – 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 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 – nothing much. Most offers of work came from the US.
Between 2002 and 2009, Jean-Baptiste appeared in the American police procedural Without a Trace, but we pretty much didn’t see her again on British TV screens till she turned up as the killer’s 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 in 2013 or in Debbie Tucker Green’s Hang 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. Watching her raging, resentful yet blazingly funny performance as Pansy reminded us of exactly what we’ve been missing.
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 “a woman of uncontrolled inspirations and an overwhelming capacity for love”, is convinced that her son Larry, MIA, is still alive; their other son, Chris, wants to marry Larry’s former girlfriend, Ann. As an exploration of guilt, loyalty, the destructive nature of capitalism and (coincidentally) secrets and lies, it’s as relevant now as when it was first performed on Broadway in 1947.
Yet, when she was sent the offer to play Kate, Jean-Baptiste asked director Ivo van Hove if she could take time to consider. “It’s never easy spending six months away from home,” she says, sipping strong tea. “It 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 at the National Theatre, so we met in LA to discuss the process. He told me that Ivo doesn’t talk much; it’s 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’s delightfully terrifying, though.”
Van Hove, who won a Tony award in 2016 for directing Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, was mesmerised by Jean-Baptiste’s performance as Pansy. “Hard Truths is a masterpiece,” he tells me. “When 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.”
Jean-Baptiste may have a reputation as a brilliant character actor, but she works in an industry that doesn’t 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’s 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).
Asked about the snub by Interview magazine, Jean-Baptiste, whose humour is bone-dry, said that “Pansy would’ve burned down the Academy building.” Now, Jean-Baptiste is more phlegmatic. Perhaps still frustrated, but certainly not sorry for herself. “I try to avoid the word ‘should’. Yes, I could have got those nominations and awards. You know what, it might sound flipping sappy, but I’ve had the opportunity to do two films in my life – Secrets & Lies and Hard Truths – 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.”
Not even an Oscar? “A little gold dolly would be lovely, don’t get me wrong. I grew up on BBC dramas that were about the people and for the people. That’s what Mike does so well.” Jean-Baptiste first worked with Leigh on his 1993 play It’s a Great Big Shame! and says that she would “work with him again in a heartbeat, for nothing. In fact, I’ll pay him!” They met a few days earlier, in fact, for a natter. “I was talking to him about the play, wondering why they picked me. He said: ‘Well, that’s obvious, they couldn’t get anyone else.’ That’s our relationship.”
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’ rhythms – alongside Cranston’s Joe, Paapa Essiedu is Chris and Hayley Squires is Ann – and sharing her doubt. “I was telling Hayley that I slipped up on one line and was convinced that they’d 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 love the fact that I care so much. If you don’t feel like that, go home. Do something else.”
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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’s just one of several creative endeavours. She composed the music for the score of Mike Leigh’s 1997 film Career Girls and sings on the soundtrack (Leigh once told me that she has “a beautiful voice”). She is currently writing a script about grief, which she “has parked” as All My Sons is infused with grief and she wants all her attention to be on the play.
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 – it’s good enough to hang in the National Portrait Gallery. “I left it in Mike’s 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’s the best compliment I could have got.”
Is there anything else she can do, I ask, half joking. She laughs. “Well … I can cook. Garden. Knit. Sew. I’ve got an insatiable appetite for creativity. I’m like: I’ve gotta know how to do this! It’s not like a neurotic energy because I’m very laid-back. It’s about greed; I’ve 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’m just waiting for a window to sign up again.”
We talk, briefly, about the US. She says that she lives “in a blue bubble where everybody is nice and sane, apart from a few nutters”. She has talked before about the David and Goliath nature of film-making in which indie cinema is the underdog; Trump’s threat to impose 100% tariffs on “any and all movies” made abroad could pretty much destroy indie films.
“It’s rough out there for sure,” she says. “It’s very difficult to be an artist in this kind of environment. It’s 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’t so good because they’re trying to do something different. I’m not sure the movie industry understands that any more.”
For now, Jean-Baptiste is focusing on All My Sons. I ask if her friends are all clamouring for tickets and she nods furiously. “Oh my God! I’ve got people here, in Europe, in the States, all asking the best date to come. I don’t know! Or they say the play is going to be brilliant. Don’t say that! We don’t know that yet. Pressure. Pressure. Pressure. Fucking hell! But it’s great people want to come.”
I tell her that I can’t wait to see it. “I can’t 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 … it’s all good!” The sun suddenly streams into the room and Jean-Baptiste smiles.
All My Sons is at Wyndham’s theatre, London, to 7 March.
