Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic How, as an actor, do you get into the head of a difficult character? And how, once you\u2019re in there, do you handle the discomfort of playing someone racked with fear, anguish and rage? What can it feel like playing someone like Pansy, the protagonist of Mike Leigh\u2019s new film Hard Truths? \u201cShe\u2019s not easy,\u201d says Marianne Jean-Baptiste with a throaty laugh, as if relieved to have left the character behind. \u201cThat fear, that anxiety, constantly being on the alert for danger, for a threat \u2014 it\u2019s very taxing.\u201dPansy is a London woman bitterly frustrated with her life, a catastrophist able to convert the minor annoyances of an ordinary day into something on a level with the 10 plagues. Jean-Baptiste brings her to life more than vividly in a mesmerising performance, matching force-10 intensity \u2014 as Pansy launches into her caustic jeremiads against the world \u2014 with the most delicate psychological nuance.In 1996, Jean-Baptiste captured the world\u2019s attention as a much more empathetic character: Hortense Cumberbatch, a London optometrist searching for her birth family in Leigh\u2019s Palme d\u2019Or-winning Secrets & Lies. With that film, she became the first Black British woman to be nominated for an Oscar. Her reunion with the director nearly 30 years on is no less a triumph: she has been nominated for Best Leading Actress at the Baftas, after already winning Best Lead Performance in the British Independent Film Awards, with similar wins in assorted North American film critics\u2019 prizes.Sitting in a London hotel, wearing round thick-rimmed professorial glasses and a crisp asymmetrical haircut, Jean-Baptiste explains how she and the other members of a predominantly Black cast \u2014 including her Secrets & Lies co-star Michele Austin \u2014 created their roles in Hard Truths. As fits the famously distinctive Leigh method, they started with a blank slate, characters and narrative emerging through a collaborative process that begins with actors contributing elements of people they have known.Pansy, says Jean-Baptiste, is \u201cpieces of people, little bits. You take gentleness away from some person, and then you give them a resentment from something that happened, and then you create some disappointments for them\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009You chip away and you add and you think, until it becomes a totally different person.\u201dThe method involves knowing everything about a character\u2019s life, right back to childhood: \u201cFirst memory, who lived across the street, what school they went to, what was the bus route.\u201d Her preparation also involved walking around and seeing the world through Pansy\u2019s eyes. \u201cYou monitor the character. Mike would never say, \u2018Go out as Pansy in character\u2019 \u2014 that would be quite dangerous, actually \u2014 but just sort of, \u2018Gently go into character and just observe as she would observe, and feel.\u201d That\u2019s where you start to go, \u2018OK \u2014 doesn\u2019t like pigeons, doesn\u2019t like going under bridges because of bird shit.\u2019 The this and the that\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009And so you start sort of collecting, building.\u201dThe richly detailed realism of Hard Truths also emerges from the shared experiences of its predominantly Black cast \u2014 from the culture of hair salons to specific but fleeting Caribbean inflections in the dialogue and delivery. \u201cEverybody\u2019s grown up with the same sorts of things \u2014 what\u2019s happening on Sunday for dinner, who would be bringing this, who would be cooking that, and who always turns up late\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009Somebody second-generation \u2014 brought up in London, Jamaican mother \u2014 would know how to do patois, but wouldn\u2019t speak like that necessarily all the time. It would just be flipping in and out when you felt like it.\u201dIt\u2019s one of the few films that you see with a modern Black family where they\u2019re not reacting to racismAs for the specific reasons why Pansy experiences life as she does, it seems there is a veil of omert\u00e0 involved in the Leigh method. \u201cIt\u2019s a thing that we don\u2019t really talk about \u2014 the back-story and stuff.\u201d But Jean-Baptiste quashes my speculative suggestion that Pansy\u2019s malaise might stem partly from an experience of racism \u2014 not that it is ever alluded to in the film. \u201cWe almost deliberately do not react to racism in the film \u2014 it\u2019s one of the few films that you see with a modern Black family where they\u2019re not reacting to racism. There isn\u2019t a miscarriage of justice \u2014 it\u2019s just people living and being human.\u201dRaised in Peckham, Jean-Baptiste, 57, still has an unchanged London accent and intonations, despite spending the last 23 years in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, physical therapist and former ballet dancer Evan Williams, and two daughters in their twenties. She studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, then first worked with Leigh in 1993, when he cast her in his stage play It\u2019s A Great Big Shame. Three years later, she played Hortense, then \u2014 an accomplished musician \u2014 wrote the score for Leigh\u2019s film Career Girls (1997).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Since then, Jean-Baptiste has enjoyed a very successful career in the US, although the work has not always offered the same exploratory opportunities as a Leigh project. She has chalked up a gallery of authority figures (a police chief here, a forbidding boffin there) and appeared in 159 episodes of procedural series Without a Trace, as FBI missing persons investigator Vivian Johnson.What is it like living with a single character for so long? \u201cThe first couple of years were really hard,\u201d she admits. \u201cIt was like: what the hell? Then you kind of hit a level \u2014 \u2018OK, how do you make this interesting? How do you find something new in it?\u2019 I kept giving myself acting exercises.\u201dAdept as she is at making the most of mainstream projects, she admits, \u201cI prefer the stuff that\u2019s out on the margins.\u201d Probably furthest out in her CV is In Fabric, the 2018 film by defiantly left-field British writer-director Peter Strickland, in which she plays a woman who falls prey to the malign effects of her own red dress. On the whole, the UK has offered the juiciest challenges, including TV roles \u2014 notably her 1999 performance as Doreen Lawrence in The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, directed by Paul Greengrass. She was a ferocious barrister in Broadchurch and, more recently, a fantasy novelist targeted by a predatory conman in BBC series The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies, in which role she combined vulnerability and hauteur.She has also done adventurous stage work, notably with Peter Brook in Paris, and at the Royal Court in hang by debbie tucker green: \u201cShe\u2019s one of the best writers. Her dialogue \u2014 no one does it like that. It\u2019s like jazz music.\u201dJean-Baptiste says she avoids too much politics: \u201cI\u2019m like, head in the sand, man. I don\u2019t watch all the stuff, because you can get infuriated by it.\u201d But, as a US resident she is fervently hoping for an end to the Trump era and its culture of rage, perhaps informed by having lived in the head of someone like Pansy. \u201cYou kind of think, \u2018Aren\u2019t you tired of feeling like this?\u2019 Because it is exhausting \u2014 the screaming, the hate. I\u2019m tired of the hate.\u201d\u2018Hard Truths\u2019 is in UK cinemas from January 31 and in US cinemas now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic How, as an actor, do you get into the head of a difficult character? And how, once you\u2019re in there, do you handle the discomfort of playing someone racked with fear, anguish and rage? What can it feel like playing someone like Pansy, the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":179803,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-179802","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179802"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179804,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179802\/revisions\/179804"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}