“There’s a real honesty and integrity to it all,” says Felicity Jones, looking out across a sea of concrete. “You can really see the correspondence between the psyche coming out of World War II and the architecture.”
The British actress is enjoying the view at the Barbican, perhaps the most famous Brutalist building in London and a maze of monolithic blocks and corridors connecting residential units, public spaces and one of the capital’s most famous cultural centres. It’s a delightfully inventive place to discuss her latest film, “The Brutalist,” a film she completely approves of. “That’s a good idea,” she says. “And perfect conditions!” (The bright blue sky provides a stunning backdrop to all the towering grays.)
Brady Corbett’s gripping drama about a Holocaust survivor and brutalist architect in postwar America — which will be released by A24 on December 20 — has been captivating critics since it leaned into the gun. Jones may not appear until halfway through the unconventional 215-minute film, but her performance has the 41-year-old actress into awards talk, along with co-stars Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce. It has already received a Golden Globe nomination.
Jones says that Corbett and his writing partner Mona Fastvold approached her about playing Erzsébet Tóth, the wheelchair-using wife of Brody Laszlo Toth, two years before production began in 2023 in Budapest (replacing Philadelphia).
“I couldn’t leave the script,” she says. “I liked the wit and I thought the ideology of the film was interesting, the idea of escaping fascism and falling straight into the arms of capitalism.”
Ironically, the architectural panels she stopped at to admire are a group of Barbican housing, built to be rented by the council but now privately owned and expensive. She notes that, like the Toth family, they too fell into the arms of capitalism. “But they are a special and unique place to live.”
Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist
A decade separates The Brutalist from Jones’s groundbreaking film The Theory of Everything.
“Exactly ten years, it’s very strange,” she says. Jones’ portrayal of Stephen Hawking’s wife Jane in the biographical love story put her on Hollywood’s radar, leading to her Academy Award nominations and studio roles.
But more than just critical acclaim and a passable round number connect the two features.
Both see Jones playing supportive husbands to troubled geniuses. However, both “go beyond just the title of wife or mother,” she says. “Like many parts I’m drawn to, it has an element of challenge.”
In Theory, Jane Hawking was a young woman in the early stages of her life and career, like Jones at the time. For “The Brutalist,” she needed the experiences she had gained since then to play a brilliant woman whose life has been ravaged by history. “My family gave me the resources and strength to take on this role,” she says. (Jones has two children, ages 2 and 4, with her director husband, Charles Gard — and is “in the swamp” when it comes to parenting, she says.)
One of the leading roles that came quickly after Theory was the (also) defiant Jyn Erso in 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. She follows in the footsteps of her rebellious co-star Diego Luna (whose previous series you haven’t yet seen). Andor” – blame the children), it’s a world you’ll gladly return to. “There’s unfinished business there,” she says, now parked on a bench after quite a few wrong turns and dead ends (she’s written stories about getting lost in The Barbican). “I think in the right circumstances, if you put Jane in the right story, why not?”
More concrete projects are the ones Jones has on the table, including “Train Dreams” from “Sing Sing” co-writer and “Jockey” director Clint Bentley, in which she will star alongside Joel Edgerton (who was originally slated to play Brody in ” “Brutal,” Incidentally), and Michael Showalter’s Christmas comedy “Oh. What. Hazar.” Her production company Piecrust is adapting a graphic novel called “100 Nights of Hero,” and she is developing a TV series in which she will play the boss of a family-owned Formula One team.
But for now, Jones is embracing the growing appreciation for the film she loves so dearly.
“There’s an appetite for an event, and it’s like with The Brutalist, that’s what it is,” she says. “It’s an American epic – for everyone. It’s a piece of pure cinema.”