Marianne Jean-Baptiste: “I would work for Mike Leigh again in a heartbeat – in fact, I would pay him!” | Marianne Jean Baptiste

MAriane Jean-Baptiste arrived at the training venue in Southwark, south London, and immediately declared herself exhausted. It wouldn’t be surprising if her nerves got the better of her; We’re seven days into a three-week rehearsal period for a new production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, which is very short by anyone’s standards. Stripping off unnecessary layers of clothing — it’s not a cold morning — she says jet lag has been messing with her circadian rhythms since she flew out of Los Angeles 10 days ago. “I woke up at 3.17am and said: ‘Damn, 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 5:30 a.m. It’s better to rest and meditate even if I can’t sleep. She was just coming downstairs when her alarm went off at seven in the morning.

These days, it takes a lot to lure Jean-Baptiste away from her home in Los Angeles, where she has lived full-time with her husband and two daughters since 2003. She loves returning to her native London to see family and friends, but Los Angeles has a slower pace, optimism, and vast surroundings — and, for a long time, has offered better job opportunities. Her breakout role as an optometrist searching for her mother in Mike Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets & Lies earned her 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 after that — nothing much. Most of the job offers came from the United States.

Between 2002 and 2009, Jean-Baptiste appeared in US police procedural Without a Trace, but we didn’t see her again on British television until she appeared as a murderer’s defense lawyer in the second season of Broadchurch in 2015. If you’re lucky, you may have caught her in the revival of James Baldwin’s play The Amen Corner in 2013 or in Debbie. Tucker Green’s commentary 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 angry, upset, and very funny performance as Pansy reminded us exactly what we were missing.

It was a delight to hear that she had returned to the London stage in All My Sons, a play she had admired while a student at RADA but had never seen on stage before. The drama revolves around the Keller family: the father, Joe, is falsely acquitted after selling defective plane parts to the US military, resulting in the deaths of 21 American pilots; The mother, Kate, described by Miller as “a woman of uncontrollable 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 ex-girlfriend, Anne. As an exploration of guilt, loyalty, the destructive nature of capitalism, secrets, and (coincidentally) lies, it is as relevant now as it was when it premiered on Broadway in 1947.

However, when she was sent an offer to play Kate, Jean-Baptiste asked director Ivo van Hove if she could take some time to think about it. “It’s never easy to spend six months away from home,” she says, sipping strong tea. “It has to be worth not being able to draw, or garden, or cook, or write, or walk my dogs. But Ivo is a great director, and it was an opportunity to work with Bryan Cranston, who plays Joe. Brian had worked with Ivo on Network at the National Theatre, so we met in Los Angeles to discuss the process. He told me that Ivo doesn’t talk a lot; it’s very instinctive. He works with actors who come in with their ideas for a character, which he then molds and shapes. When I do theatre, I always end up wondering why I said yes For terrorism, it’s exhilaratingly terrifying.

Van Hove, who won a Tony Award in 2016 for directing Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” was enamored with Jean-Baptiste’s performance as Pansy. “Hard Truths is a masterpiece,” he told me. “When I saw Marianne doing a merciless imitation of a woman plagued by demons and in a constant state of emotional rage, I called our producers and said I had found a mother in all my children! And I was the luckiest director in the world when she said yes.”

Jean-Baptiste may have a reputation as a great character actress, but she works in an industry that doesn’t always understand how to use her talents. When I spoke to her earlier this year on Hard Truths, she said she’s always had to compromise because of the lack of intersectional roles for black women in both 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 became clear that the Academy had other ideas, much to the ire of critics here and in the States (she was also nominated for a BAFTA, losing out to Mickey Madison for Anora).

When Jean-Baptiste, who had a great sense of humor, was asked about the snub by Interview magazine, he said that “Pansy would have burned down the Academy building.” Now, Jean-Baptiste is calmer. She may still be frustrated, but she’s definitely not sorry for herself. “I try to avoid the word ‘should’. Yes, I could have gotten those nominations and awards. You know, it may sound silly, but I’ve had the opportunity to do two films in my life – Secrets, Lies and Hard Truths – that made people stop me in the street and say they decided to look for their mother or call their sister after 10 years.” [Pansy has a fractious relationship with her sister Chantelle, played by Michele Austin]. When you get this kind of verification, nothing can touch it.

Not even an Oscar? “A little gold would be nice, don’t get me wrong. I grew up on BBC plays that were about the people and for the people. And that’s what Mike does well.” Jean-Baptiste first worked with Lee on his 1993 play It’s a Great, Great Shame! She says she would “work with him again in a heartbeat, for free. In fact, I’ll pay him!” They had met a few days ago, in fact, as gossip. “I was talking to him about the play, wondering why they chose me. He said, ‘Well, that’s clear, they couldn’t get anyone else.’ That’s our relationship.”

Jean-Baptiste admits that doubt creeps into her mind. Van Hove is known for his groundbreaking productions and tight rehearsal time of approximately six weeks, which makes this three-week period for All My Sons seem absurdly short. A week later, Jean-Baptiste is still learning the rhythms of the other actors — along with Joe Cranston, Papa Essidu as Chris, and Hayley Squires as Anne — and shares her doubts. “I was telling Hayley that I got a couple of lines wrong and I was convinced that they would talk to me afterwards and tell me that they were thinking about finding someone else to play Kate. She had the exact same fear! We would laugh about it, but I love the fact that I care so much. If you don’t feel like it, go home. Do something else.”

The joke is that Jean-Baptiste could easily do something else. Jean-Baptiste grew up in Peckham, south London, in the 1970s with a care worker mother from Antigua and a laborer father from St Lucian, and attended theater workshops until he gained a place at RADA. She’s wanted to act for as long as she can remember, but the truth is that it’s just one of many creative endeavours. She composed the music for Mike Leigh’s 1997 film Career Girls and sings on the soundtrack (Leigh once told me she had a “beautiful voice”). She is currently writing a screenplay about grief, which she has “put on hold” because All My Sons is full of grief and she wants all her attention to be on the play.

She also has a studio in her garden in Los Angeles where she paints. I ask to see some of her work, before briefly panicking that it might be terrible, and then being startled when she shows me a photo of me on her phone – good enough to hang in the National Portrait Gallery. “I left it in Mike’s trailer in a nice box as a gift at the end of filming Hard Truths, and he came up to me with a wild look and said it looked just like him. It’s the best compliment I could have gotten.”

Is there anything else she can do, she asked, half-jokingly. She laughs. “Well… I can cook. Garden. Knit. Sew. I have an insatiable appetite for creativity. I’m like, ‘I have to know how to do this!’ It’s not like nervous energy because I’m so laid back. It’s about greed; I have to do things. I signed up for a shoemaking course at a technical college in downtown Los Angeles and then the bloody pandemic happened. I’m just waiting for a window to sign up again.”

We talk briefly about the United States. She says she lives “in a blue bubble where everyone is nice and sane, except for a few crazy people.” I’ve talked before about the David and Goliath nature of filmmaking where independent cinema is the underdog; Trump’s threat to impose 100% tariffs on “any and all films” made abroad could greatly devastate independent films.

“It’s definitely difficult,” she says. “It’s very difficult to be an artist in this kind of environment. It’s all about the money and how many likes something gets on social media. I really love when a director makes a great film, and the next one isn’t so good because they try to do something different. I’m not sure the film industry understands that anymore.”

At the moment, Jean-Baptiste is focusing on the book All My Children. I asked her if her friends were all clamoring for tickets, and she nodded angrily. “Oh my God! I have people here, in Europe, in the States, all asking when the next best date is. I don’t know! Or they say the play will be great. Don’t say that! We don’t know it yet. Pressure. Pressure. Pressure. Damn hell! But great people want to come.”

Tell her I can’t wait to see her. “I can’t wait to be in it! Well, I can. I could have done two more weeks of rehearsals. But we did Hard Facts in three months and look how well that worked. 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, Londonuntil March 7.