There are difficult people, and then there’s Pansy. Oscar nominee Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays the bitter and broken working-class woman in acclaimed director Mike Leigh’s latest film.

“You’ve got a character who’s had a lot of pain, disappointment, and failures,” Jean-Baptiste says . “Who suffers from quite a few issues that have not really been dealt with.”

Over Zoom, Jean-Baptiste is warm and amiable, often bursting into laughter. It’s a far cry away from the character she portrays in Leigh’s newest feature film. From the very first moment we meet Pansy—waking up one morning, seemingly mad at the sun for daring to rise—it’s clear that something is deeply wrong. As the day progresses, she berates her husband Curtley (David Webber), a plumber, and lays into her wallflower of a son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), for his lack of ambition. It’s immediately evident that Pansy moves through life with a scowl and an unkind word for practically everyone she encounters—whether it’s a dental hygienist, the grocery store clerk, or her own sister, Chantelle, a hairdresser, played by frequent Leigh collaborator Michele Austin.

Ironically, it was Jean-Baptiste’s innate decency that made her Leigh’s choice to portray the pill that is Pansy. “She’s a consummate human being,” he says over the phone. “She’s got an enormous sense of humor. You get no shit from her at all. She is a character actress, as indeed all the actors I work with are. She is incredibly versatile.”

After seeing Pansy dress down a furniture store employee and demand to speak with her manager, one might be tempted to call Pansy the dreaded K-slur, a “Karen.” But Baptiste’s devastating, nuanced performance makes it clear that Pansy defies simple categorization. Set in post-COVID London, Hard Truths explores the psyche of a woman still in the physical and emotional throws of the global panic. “I was uncovering a lot of stuff that she had—anxiety, OCD, depression,” says Jean-Baptiste. “On some level, I wanted her to get help, because you grow to love these characters and look after and protect them.”

Of course, getting help is easier said than done. “We set her in a family and in circumstances whereby they wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that,” she says. “They’d just go, ‘Look, just get on with it. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you go outside? What’s your problem?’ If you have those issues that are not being treated, what is the result?”

It’s a relentless, fearless performance from Jean-Baptiste, who’s made a name for herself as one of Britain’s finest character actors onstage and onscreen. After studying at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Art and meeting Leigh in the British theater scene, she broke through in Hollywood starring as Hortense Cumberbatch in Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets and Lies, which earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress, making her the first Black British actress to get nominated for an Academy Award. Although she made history, Jean-Baptiste’s reasons for signing onto Secrets and Lies were less lofty.

“I’ve been a bit cheeky with him in the past,” she tells me. “I remember when we were doing Secrets and Lies, I’d already done a play with him, so I knew the method. So when it was coming to choosing the occupation of Hortense, I was like, ‘Oh, she’s a pilot.’ Because I knew that I would have to go off and study and get to learn how to fly planes.”

Leigh’s method is the stuff of legends. Like all his productions, Hard Truths began with no set script. Before they began rehearsals in London, Jean-Baptiste had no idea how central Pansy would be to the film. “I’d spoken to Mike, and he sort of said, ‘Look, she’s going to be fairly central, because we’re flying you over to do it,’ Jean-Baptiste said. “But you kind of never know. So you have to sort of jump in and say, ‘Okay, I’m willing to do it.’’

Over the course of the three-month exploratory rehearsal process—approximately half the rehearsal time typical for a Leigh film—Jean-Baptiste and the director developed Pansy’s arc, backstory, and identity. Coming from theater, Leigh has a famously detail-oriented rehearsal process. “For the initial part of the process, you work in isolation with Mike. It’s just one-on-one,” says Jean-Baptiste. “You go in with a list of people that you’ve met [in your life] and go through the list discussing each person…. That list gets shortened until you, or rather he, decides on anything from two to three to five persons, and you start to try and merge them into one person.”

It’s a process akin to psychoanalysis, Jean-Baptiste says, and culminates in the creation of a character’s entire backstory, from their first memory to the moment they appear onscreen. “You’ve got a bloody Rolodex in your brain,” Jean-Baptiste says. “You know what school they went to, you know what time school finished. You know the neighbors that lived either side of you, the woman that lived across the road, the guy that lived down the street that nearly ran you over with his bicycle who you’ve never forgiven.” If you can imagine, it gets even more granular than that. “What’s in the cupboards? No, they wouldn’t have that tea. They’re Jamaican. They’re going to have honey and ginger. They’re going to have ackees in the cupboard,” says Jean-Baptiste. “You just don’t ever get that experience other than when you work with him.”

This level of detail and specificity is necessary so the actors can take on the daunting task ahead of them: dramatic improvisation. “You’re never handed a script, because you are improvising,” says Jean-Baptiste. “So it’s really a risk that you take when you undertake a Mike Leigh job, because you don’t know what it’s going to be.”

While there isn’t a set script, Leigh believes the painstaking and detail-oriented rehearsal process provides a road map for the actors to follow. “It’s very precise and very thoroughly rehearsed,” he says. “But everything you see is grown out of exploratory improvisation.”

Still, making dialogue up on the spot is easier said than done. “It’s such a terrifying and freeing way to work,” Jean-Baptiste says. ”You get used to knowing the character’s arc—or lack thereof—just not knowing what you’re doing.”

Not knowing what you’re doing comes with an unpredictability that can border on the dangerous, at times. “Obviously we don’t know what’s going to happen when we start the improvisations. I was convinced someone was going to hit her,” Jean-Baptiste says. “I was like, ‘Somebody is going to smack this woman.’”

Living in Pansy’s prickly skin wasn’t easy for Jean-Baptiste. “It was a very, very difficult place to live, and it wasn’t so easy to leave her on set, unfortunately,” Jean-Baptiste says. For most of the London-based shoot, she was living alone. “You can’t really quite get rid of it, because you’re observing the world through her eyes. So I’d be out shopping and whatever, and I’d be like, ‘Look at the state of that person,’ or, ‘That person’s stupid,’ or, ‘Why didn’t they do that?’ And I’d be like, ‘Oh dear, here she is.’” Living with Pansy, however, was just part of the job. “I’ve just got to embrace her and tell her, ‘It’s okay,’” she says. “It was a tough one, I have to say, but tough in all the right ways.”

Although it was difficult, Jean-Baptiste knows how necessary it is to shed light on those coping with existential issues—specifically for people of color. “I’m not sure that we often get to see stories about Black families that are just about living—not reacting to outside forces, or issues, or any of those things,” says Jean-Baptiste. I think that’s one of the things that I’m really happy about with the movie…. A couple of people that have seen it said, ‘God, Mike, that’s my aunt, that’s my grandmother.’” And you’re like, “Oh, well, my condolences.”

Hard Truths is primarily concerned with the interior life of Black women, from Pansy to Chantelle, and beyond. Leigh, an 81-year-old white man, had no qualms about telling a story that bears little resemblance to his own life experience. “To put it tactically, I don’t give a monkey’s fuck about that,” he says. “I really don’t. I did a play about Greek Australians. I did a play in London about Jews. I’ve made films about upper-class people. I’ve made period films about people that are really quite remote to us. I’ve certainly explored all classes of English society.”

For Leigh, Hard Truths is about what all of his films are about: humanity. “Apart from anything else, what I’m doing in the film is challenging received movie notions about depicting Black people,” he says. “It’s just about people. It’s about all of us in our good and less so good aspects.”

This year, Leigh is receiving the Ebert Director Award at Toronto International Film Festival, where Hard Truths will premiere, before embarking on a limited run in NY on December 6, followed by nationwide release on January 10. “I was enormously fond of Roger Ebert, and his reviews of my films—not least my very first film, Bleak Moments, 50 years ago—[were] incredibly positive and enthusiastic,” Leigh says.

While he’s chuffed at the recognition, for Leigh, Hard Truths is an opportunity to highlight the singular talent that is Jean-Baptiste, his friend and collaborator of more than three decades. “She’s incredibly intelligent, incredibly creative, incredibly imaginative, incredibly generous,” he says. “She’s a delight to be with and to work with.”

No one would ever accuse Pansy of being a delight, but Jean-Baptiste hopes audiences find the same humanity in her that she was able to find while making Hard Truths. “I hope that it gives them pause when dealing with the Pansys of the world,” she says. “We meet them in the supermarket or in the car park, and you think, ‘How could somebody be so angry?’ Have a bit of compassion and pause and go, ‘Okay. That ain’t about me. I haven’t done anything to you. You’re going through something. It’s all right.’”

Hard Truths will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival before being released on December 6. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.