Marianne Jean-Baptiste Plays the Angriest Woman in the World. Now Give Her an Oscar.

The gym routine was one of the first things to go. Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. And happiness simply would not do when it came to Hard Truths.

In Hard Truths, actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman living in London who suffers from a debilitating cocktail of depression, agoraphobia, and, most of all, the indignity of having to exist alongside the cretins of the world who surround her.

She spends her days like a dormant volcano, sleeping until some unwelcome obligation rouses her: feeding her husband and son, a visit with her sister, picking up groceries, or going to a doctor’s appointment. Unbeknownst to them, everyone Pansy interacts with, from her family to a random cashier, are tectonic plates whose whisper of a shift or movement causes her to erupt.

“She’s a bit harsh,” Jean-Baptiste, 57, told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, grinning, like she amused herself with the understatement. “She’s a bit much.”

Hard Truths, which is now in theaters, was written and directed by Mike Leigh, the British auteur known for eye-opening character studies that are revelatory in the simplicity of the human stories they tell, like Happy-Go-Lucky, Vera Drake, and Secret & Lies, the 1996 film that marked Jean-Baptiste’s first partnership with the director—and which scored her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

The most innocuous aspects of daily life set Pansy off. The outbursts are alarming and off-putting. Yet they’re outrageous and baseless to the point of being, oftentimes, funny. When telling off everyone in the grocery line for inconveniencing her, she chides the tall woman behind her for “standing there looking like an ostrich.” You reflexively laugh—it’s a great read!—even as you’re mortified, on behalf of a woman who clearly can’t help saying these things, and of the innocent people subject to her wanton wrath.

After each successive tirade, you’re left to wonder what pain is beneath these lashings, and whether Pansy regrets or mourns the fact that it’s her habit to be so pugnacious. Your heart breaks as you see how this condition, for lack of the better word, is so clearly isolating.

And Jean-Baptiste is positively riveting in the role. It is not an understatement, hyperbole, or a bit of flattery to call it the best acting performance of the year. To that point, many critics agree.

When we first met Jean-Baptiste, there was immediately something unfamiliar, after watching her performance in Hard Truths: a huge smile.

As she was walking into the sky-high Manhattan hotel room where our interview took place, she had just gotten word that she had won the Best Actress prize from the New York Film Critics Circle.

In the weeks that would follow, she’d also win the same award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics. That make her one of only five actresses to win what is known is the critics trifecta, in the footsteps of Cate Blanchett (Tár and Blue Jasmine), Isabelle Huppert (Elle), Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky), and Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake).

The publicity team behind Hard Truths has blanketed its movie poster with all the Best Actress citations and “best of year” reviews Jean-Baptiste has received, like a patchwork quilt of excellence. She’s currently nominated for the upcoming Critics Choice Awards and BAFTAs, and is awaiting to see if the surge of accolades amount to an Oscar nomination in the wildly competitive Best Actress category when it is announced Jan. 26.

It’s been nearly three decades since Jean-Baptiste has received this kind of attention for her filmwork. She’s spent much of the time in between working in television in Los Angeles, where she’s been a mainstay of procedural and crime dramas like CBS’ Without a Trace and NBC’s Blindspot.

Going back to that kind of work after a project like Hard Truths “is going to be hard on some levels,” Jean-Baptiste said. “If we only had this process,” of working with Leigh on projects like Hard Truths, “I’d love it. But the majority or the work is the other way, isn’t it?”

With awards season now at its most hectic frenzy, we talked with Jean-Baptiste about how she’s weathering it all, how on Earth she accessed someone as prickly as Pansy in Hard Truths, and balancing this kind of work with the network TV series that have been the bread-and-butter of her career.

How do you feel about the award season process, the horse race of it all?

Obviously when you do this type of movie, you don’t even know what it’s going to be about, much less whether it will qualify for this, that, or the other. So you just kind of do it, hoping that people will resonate with it on the other end. And with this one, it has, so very clearly. I enjoy it for what it is, and being able to talk about the film and the process. And it’s nice for people to acknowledge your work and go, “Oh, you were good in that.”

I would imagine doing this all with Mike Leigh again is very meaningful.

It’s funny to do this whole full circle moment with him. Then and now. It’s all been quite overwhelming and overwhelmingly positive.

You’re now in the conversation with actresses like Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman.

Yeah, and I mean, why not? It’s about opportunity, isn’t it? It really is. It’s about the thing that gets seen and is talked about. But you’re never ever quite sure what that is. So the focus then has to be on the work and nothing else.

What was your reaction when you first screened the film?

I was stunned. I was looking at her going, man, she’s a bit harsh.

She’s a bit much. Are people going to get it? But by the time we got to [the Toronto International Film Festival] and watched it with an audience, you kind of went, “Oh, it’s funny.” So I’ve been discovering it by actually watching it with other audiences. But I certainly thought this is a tough one because it’s just very simple. It’s almost like you open the door and you have a glimpse in on this family.

People who watch Pansy in the film find her, like you said, harsh and a major force. When you were playing her, did you feel like she was this harsh person who puts people off?

I’m feeling the pain that’s causing it while playing it. Do you know what I mean? And she wouldn’t see herself as harsh. She just tells the truth. That’s as far as she’s concerned. You’re so not aware [when filming] because you’re monitoring. You’re not quite in it. It’s when you see it back that you start going, “Christ, did she really say that?”

Have you been surprised by how many people recognize a Pansy in their own lives?

Yeah. In mother-in-laws, aunties, grandmas. That’s, like, bloody hell.

You seem like a person very far from Pansy’s uncoiled personality. Was there a part of that personality that was in you that you were able to tap into?

I guess there’s gotta be a bit of it inside me somewhere to be able to sort of trigger it like that. But I’m super chill. I just really am. Somebody said to me once that I’m so laid back, I’m usually lying down. You know what I mean? My way in was the observations and what those observations made her feel. about life, about anybody and anything. Just imagine if the most simple thing made you irate about life, about the way people serve food and don’t smile. One of her things that didn’t make it in the film was when people hold the door open for her. What are they doing that for? The whole suspicion. Some man holding the door open for you? Don’t trust it. It’s that.

Did it feel cathartic to be the person who gets to explode about those irritations?

It didn’t feel cathartic. I didn’t get to enjoy it in that way. Because you’re so in it. I’d spy Mike Lee laughing occasionally when we were doing stuff. It’s a weird one.

Watching her interact with the world is almost like watching an alien do it. She goes into the furniture store, for example. Everyone who goes into a furniture store knows that someone working there is going to ask them if they need help with anything. Yet it sets her off in this explosive way when the employee asks if she needs help. But I’d imagine that someone who’s lived on Earth as long as she has would know that’s a normal thing to happen, yet she’s so triggered by it.

She’s probably had the conversation in the car on her way to the furniture store, practicing the argument that she’s gonna have with the person she hasn’t even encountered yet. That’s how deep her fear of going out and interacting is, but she has to do it. Since she was very young, she’s been forced to go out and be, so when she’s out, it’s like defending herself from every angle. She attacks before anybody’s given the chance to attack her. Not that they are, but that’s her assumption.

The truth is, so many of her insults are wildly entertaining. They reminded me of “reads” that a drag queen would do. In different contexts, these insults would be considered fabulous and fierce. But in this context…

It’s awful! But I dare say that poor Pansy thinks that she is being completely and utterly fair and just describing what she’s seeing. She’s just describing, “You look like an ostrich standing there. You look like a piece of string. Go and eat a burger.” It’s fair enough to her. We wouldn’t dream of speaking to anybody like that.

What was your life like during production?

Oh man. I was in an apartment in Camden. I live in Los Angeles, so they flew me over to do this. I began being very sort of like, yeah, I’m going to work out! I’m going to do this! I’m going to do that! And then when we got into building that character and so on, the gym went out the window because of the endorphins. So I’d go into work and it’d be really hard to get. I’d want to play and joke. It’d be really hard to get into fancy and I’d be like, oh s---. So then it became sort of like quiet, quiet. I did a lot of reading. A lot of cooking and things that she didn’t like doing.

When you go back to Los Angeles and a TV show comes your way, will it be hard to go back to that process when you’ve just had, which seems to be such a creatively fulfilling experience?

I think it’s going to be hard on some levels. But I mean, let’s face it. If we only had this process, I’d love it. But the majority of work is the other way, isn’t it? I’ve worked like that for so many years. It’s just like, you’ve got to slip back in. But you do miss the detail. And it’s not that people [in TV] don’t care about that, the other kind of way of working. I just think that they’ve got into this kind of model that works. They get stuff done. But it could be so much better if they just spent a little bit of time, like rehearsing even. I’ll be able to just. I won’t have any choice, right? Unless Mike says, let’s go and do another one straight away.