You wouldn’t just cross the street to avoid Pansy, the antagonistic whirlwind played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh’s new drama Hard Truths – you'd actively run in the opposite direction.
The filmmaker’s first effort set in the modern day since 2010’s Another Year follows the most abrasive character to have appeared onscreen in years. Suffering from agoraphobia, angry at everybody she meets – especially her long-suffering family – and unable to grapple with a root cause for the depression that has taken hold over the years, she’s the kind of person you’d excuse cinemagoers for excusing themselves from spending time with.
Leigh’s typical process involves working with his actors long before a script is written, inviting them to bring characteristics from several people they know in real life as the basis for their characters, building them in collaboration from the ground up. It’s a relief to discover that Pansy no longer resembles anybody Jean-Baptiste actually knows.
The BAFTA nominated star told Zavvi: “I wasn’t looking for any particular characteristics, and through working with Mike, you’ll let go of a lot of the personality aspects you first brought to the table. By the time the character is built, it won’t resemble the people you based it on, as when you’re creating a character who has experienced enough heartbreak, disappointment and rejection, and are forming a path for her, then she will likely come out this complex.
“Pansy has the assumption that she’s not liked anyway, so she acts in a way which lives up to those assumptions. She’s the kind of person for whom everyone in her life feels a sense of dread when they see her name flash up on their phone.
“But I think it would be simplistic to describe her like as a “Karen” who is angry for the sake of it - it’s an easy and convenient way of avoiding looking at her underlying problems.”
With Pansy at ease hurling abuse at shop workers, doctors and other unlucky members of the public for their perceived wrongs, her sister couldn’t be further away from her in temperament. Chantelle (Michele Austin) is a kind, fun-loving hairdresser who loves nothing more than spending time with her clients and twenty-something daughters; you couldn’t have picked a better dramatic foil for Pansy if you tried.
However, as Austin explained, even that central dramatic tension wasn’t a glimmer in anybody’s eye when they began the process of creating these characters.
She said: “You come to Mike with a long list of people you know and their traits, which is gradually whittled down to three. Once you understand the characteristics of this character, he slowly begins to introduce you to the other actors you’re going to be working with, and suddenly, you’ve got a sister and children, and you’re taking part in all sorts of acting exercises to get to grips with what their relationships are like.
“You’re rehearsing like this until filming starts, and once on set, you’re building the scenes on location. But nothing is ever improvised – it's tightly rehearsed, and all it gets scripted, just after we shoot it!”
Chantelle is a long-suffering character, who hasn’t abandoned hope on life despite the pessimistic strain of her sister. And while they are stark opposites of the kind a screenwriter could only dream of, Austin is quick to highlight that beneath the bold aggression, their dynamic is one many families will be able to relate to.
“There are those people in the world who can always find the joy in life; it’s not necessarily that life has been good to them, they might have had hard experiences but view them in different ways. That definitely happens in families, where some relationships are different to others based on the way people view things – some personalities are just meant to clash!
“If you really think about our families and our friendships, sometimes we do have friends who can appear to be intense or have certain kind of traits, and you write that off as being part of their personality. But that’s shaped by a lifetime, and these sisters have had a lifetime of this dynamic, and Chantelle knows that she’ll always be getting hassle on the other end of the phone – she knows her sister is obviously going through something.
“We often see people out in the world who might appear angry, but they’re using that emotion to hide that they’re upset. What’s beautiful about this film is that it’s very funny at the start when you see her outbursts at everybody, but you very quickly realise that this is a shield for her pain.”
Pansy has had a traumatic past, but the film also suggests that it’s only gotten worse over time. When watching, I personally felt like she was a representation for thousands of people in the post lockdown world who, when let back out into civilisation, no longer know how to communicate reasonably with anybody.
This was a theory put forward in several reviews, but when I relayed it to Jean-Baptiste, she had the opposite opinion.
“I don’t think lockdown would have had too much of an impact on her – I mean, I doubt she’d have thought not having to deal with people, or even needing to leave the house, would have been a big deal! Her big issue at the time probably would have just been with other people’s germs, but her daily sources of anger would have remained the same.
“Just staying at home, she’d be getting wound up by pigeons going in the garden. And the fox that visits at one point, that poor thing picked the wrong garden – I love animals and wanted to go and see it, but Mike kept instructing me to stay away, as that’s what Pansy would do!”
Although Jean-Baptiste gets a plethora of hilarious comic rants, playing someone who harbours that much anger was still an intense headspace for her to be in. The actress has previously confessed that, for a short while after shooting, she had difficulty turning off Pansy’s voice in her head, and would have mean thoughts about random people she saw in the street.
Thankfully, that’s now a thing of the past; “I’ve got my own voice in my head to contend with, so I don’t need to deal with Pansy’s!”, the actress concluded. “After a while, when you’ve had to keep that much anger bubbling up inside of you, there’s a relief when you realise you don’t have to look at the world like this anymore.”
Hard Truths is in UK cinemas from Friday, 31st January.
