Felicity Jones Captivates in Awards Season Favorite ‘The Brutalist’
It’s one day after the “The Brutalist” picked up seven Golden Globe nominations — the second-most nominated project this year — but it’s business as usual for Felicity Jones. The actress, who stars in director Brady Corbet’s epic new film, is in New York for the latest stop on the press tour, which has been go-go-go since the movie debuted at the Venice Film Festival in September.
“It’s very cool — and so cool that so many of us got nominated. That’s what made it so special,” says Jones of her nomination for best supporting actress in the film. “These things are team endeavors. We have a group WhatsApp with all the actors and Brady, and everyone’s just so very happy and excited. Because you feel something’s really good, and it’s very nice when you realize other people think it’s good.”
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The film was critically lauded out of Venice — described as a career-best for lead Adrien Brody — and is primed to be a major awards season contender. The next test will be how the film performs at the box office when it’s released in theaters on Friday.
“You want it all,” says Jones, asked which response metric she finds most rewarding. “That’s quite a magical intersection when you have the artistic and the commercial meeting. And quite a rare thing, but I think with this film, it feels like it’s really entertaining people as well as addressing some big themes,” she adds. “I just heard that a lot of the early screenings have sold out. There’s a real appetite.”
The movie will launch with special 70mm presentations in New York and Los Angeles that will highlight the original widescreen VistaVision format the film was shot on.
“Our worlds seemingly feel like they’re shrinking because we’re always looking at iPhones or smartphones; our world is about the size of a small screen. And so there feels like there’s this huge appetite to see something on a much bigger scale,” she says. “I think the magic of the cinema now is it’s a group activity. It’s something to get together with friends or family and go do together. Which is such a nice antidote to the isolationism of technology.”
The 41-year-old actress was drawn to the ambition of Corbet’s vision, which took him seven years to make. “We knew that it was special because of the quality of the script. It was so brilliantly written and so intelligent about human nature,” says Jones; Corbet cowrote the film with his wife wife Mona Fastvold. “It has these big, broad, ideological themes — but then at the same time it’s underpinned by some very human interaction and the subtlety of character.”
“The Brutalist” stars Brody as famed fictional Hungarian architect László Toth, who lands in Pennsylvania after surviving the Holocaust with very little to his name other than raw talent. The architect connects with a wealthy industrialist, who learns that Toth was a celebrated architect before the war and tasks him with building an ambitious Brutalist-style community center. Jones stars as Toth’s wife Erzsébet, who joins her husband in America midway through the film, when she first appears onscreen.
“It’s so rare that you get a film that is structurally representing what’s going on with the main protagonist. In the same way that László is waiting for her arrival, so too is the audience,” she says. “The stakes are pretty high for her arrival.”
The film’s three-and-a-half-hour runtime includes a 15-minute onscreen intermission, allowing for the audience to stretch their legs, take a bathroom break — or check their phones — midway through. “It’s so novel, that experience. It’s almost like you’re at the theater or seeing a play. And I think people are really enjoying the uniqueness of that,” says Jones, who used the intermission to change into a different look during the film’s Venice premiere.
Jones has been working with stylist Nicky Yates for her recent red carpet and press appearances. For the Venice premiere, she wore a light pink gown by Prada, and for the L.A. premiere earlier this month she wore a look by Proenza Schouler with grommet-accented fabric strips.
“We’ve been doing a very mild Brutalist theme in the outfits,” says Jones. “Looking for things that have strong lines and that are quite clean. So that’s been a fun aspect of it; it’s just so nice having these opportunities to get the film out there for as many people as possible. And obviously the red carpet is a fantastic way of doing that, and have a bit of fun with fashion whilst you’re doing it.”
Jones’ next major red carpet moment will be the Golden Globes on Jan. 5., with other major awards ceremonies due to announce their nominations throughout the month. In 2015, the British actress received her first suite of major acting nominations — including an Oscar and BAFTA nod — for her role as another wife, in the Stephen Hawking biopic “The Theory of Everything.” She went on to star in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” and in 2018 took on the role of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in “The Basis of Sex.” Recent projects include George Clooney’s “The Midnight Sky” and “The Aeronauts.”
“The thing that I’m always looking for, particularly now, is something that’s distinctive, that knows what it is. And it doesn’t really matter to me what genre that is,” says Jones of what guides her choice of projects. “I’ve just done a Christmas ensemble comedy — but it absolutely knows what it is,” she adds. “That really is key to me; that it feels it’s gonna attract some attention in a world that’s full of noise.”
That film is “Oh. What. Fun.,” which will be released during the next holiday season. Before that, and in the middle of awards season for “The Brutalist,” Jones will head to Park City for the Sundance premiere of “Train Dreams” with Joel Edgerton. “Interestingly, it’s got very similar themes [as ‘The Brutalist’]. A lot of it is about America and the American dream,” says Jones of the film, which is set at the start of the 20th century.
The next few months promise to be busy, but Jones is accustomed to the pace — and as the mother of two small children, she knows that there’s no such thing as a break.
“I really want to do things that feel worth one’s time in some way,” she says. “Time is really precious when you have little children. So I feel like I have to use it wisely.”
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