Marianne Jean-Baptiste Put Everything Into ‘Hard Truths’: “It Was Petrifying, Exciting, Exhilarating”

A lot of the work happens in isolation with Mike. So he would say, “For the first day of rehearsals, come in with a list of characters.” I had over 100 people on the list. And we whittle away at this list until it gets smaller and smaller. I ended up with about five people. And at that point, he says, “We’re going to merge those five people.”

So you do an exercise whereby you’re moving around, and at each point in the particular space that you’re in, that character has to become apparent. It keeps going and going until you actually merge the characters. Then you sit down again, and you create a character from the first memory, to the age they’re gonna be when you see them in the film, with all the detail that comes into a life. It’s almost like creating a parallel universe. So I went out and I found what school she would go to. I found the house that she grew up in, worked out the distance from the house to the school, what bus she would have taken. I mean, it’s finite detail, but it’s all stuff that you can have an emotional, organic memory and recall for when you get into the improvisational section of the rehearsal period.

How does the improv experience work?

We have three and a half months of rehearsal, so what happens is, there’s a load of stuff that happens before that you don’t see. Some improvisations take five, six hours. And they’re just leading to, say, an argument, and so you start from that point. We’re establishing the running condition of the family. So everything that you don’t see up until that point, we’ve worked on it. We’ve worked on their morning routines. We’ve worked on who washes up the dishes, who doesn’t; who does the cleaning, who doesn’t. So by the time you get to that scene, all of the information from those improvisations is on hand for her.

Have any of the five people you based Pansy on seen the film?

I think a couple of them have, but what happens is, from those five people, we create a completely modern character with different aspects of those five people’s lives. And then we give them pain, heartache, disappointment, success. So they become a different person. I mean, I’d be very shocked if anyone came to me and said, “You based that character on me.”