Felicity Jones and the buzz about Hysteria
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Her new film is about the invention of the vibrator, and there is a YouTube campaign to cast her in Fifty Shades of Grey. Emine Saner meets actor and serial bonnet-wearer Felicity Jones
Every profile of Felicity Jones tends to breathlessly announce that the actor is on the brink of superstardom, though since these interviews go back to 2008, you wonder how long this can continue. "I understand it," she says. "It's a way of selling something. I think you have to zone a lot of those things out, and people will take notice when you do something interesting."
Of course, judging success by fame is too blunt a measure for an actor who insists she picks her jobs according to how interesting she finds them, not on whether they will catapult her on to magazine covers: she turned down the lead in the big-budget Mirror Mirror, with Julia Roberts as the evil queen, to be in Michael Grandage's production of Friedrich Schiller's Luise Miller at the Donmar in London. I get the feeling, moments after meeting her in a cafe around the corner from where she lives (a hipsterish bit of east London), that attention is not what drives her. She is self-contained, quiet. At first glance girl-next-door pretty, she is more interesting-looking than that: large, green-gold eyes and bone structure delicate as a sparrow.
In her latest film, Hysteria, Jones plays Emily, the dutiful daughter of a doctor who specialises in treating women with "hysteria" – a condition that covered everything from anxiety and depression to reckless behaviour. This could only be treated by a doctor reaching under the petticoats and applying manual stimulation until a paroxysm ensued (female orgasms were never spoken about). When a young doctor, played by Hugh Dancy, finds the work a strain, he comes up with the electric vibrator. "It was funny and I liked the idea of it – that an Englishman would have invented the vibrator in the Victorian period," she says. "The idea that hysteria was this catch-all term to describe any sort of psychological condition in a woman … " She smiles. "I felt like I wanted to play someone a little bit silly."
And Jones, 28, looks very at home in a bonnet. She has done several period dramas: in 2007, she played Catherine Morland in the television adaptation of Northanger Abbey, and in her next film – The Invisible Woman, based on Claire Tomalin's book about Charles Dickens's mistress Nelly Ternan – she plays opposite Ralph Fiennes (who also directs). "I enjoyed watching those kinds of films when I was growing up – Room with a View, Howards End," she says. "I guess I'm a bit of a romantic. I feel the period has to become irrelevant and you're just dealing with people. I don't think characters have changed, it's the forces that work on them that have."
There have been more contemporary roles, too. She was the lead in the romantic comedy Chalet Girl, and was in Ricky Gervais's film Cemetery Junction. Before that, there were a number of low-budget British films that got middling reviews and then seemed to disappear, including Albatross and Soul Boy. Then, last year, Jones seemed to step up a level when she won a special jury prize at the Sundance film festival for her role in Drake Doremus's Like Crazy, the largely improvised indie film (which also took the best film prize) about a long-distance relationship. The reception, she says, "was phenomenal, especially because it wasn't expected in any way". She is in the director's next film, too. Is this going to be a lifelong actor-director partnership? "I would love to. I think probably we need a bit of a break from each other, but definitely, in the future."
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Her name has recently been linked with the film adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey – if only by fans of the book who have posted several YouTube tributes featuring Jones as their dream heroine. She laughs. "I have been told," she says. Would she do it? "It would depend on the script. I wouldn't dismiss it. I love this idea of YouTube casting, or casting through Twitter. I think that's going to become more powerful." The internet is exciting for film-makers, she says. "It was fascinating to experience something like Like Crazy, which was made completely independently, just a group of people deciding they wanted to make a film. Increasingly, that will happen and there needs to be a platform, like an online cinema where you can watch these microbudget films." She has just finished working on a short film with a friend. "It's a time when the cost of making a film is so low it means you can make really fascinating, weird and amusing stories. There has been a shift. It's exciting."
Jones was brought up in Bournville in Birmingham by her mother, who worked in the advertising department of the local paper; her parents divorced when she was very young. She remembers being taken to see plays regularly as a child, and when she joined a drama club at the age of 11, "I found I enjoyed it more than school. There was an amazing man, Colin Edwards, who was a real mentor and still is, and he wasn't afraid to introduce us to work like Harold Pinter at a young age. I just remember thinking, 'I like this world.' It felt right."
She was 12 when she got her first job in a television film, Treasure Seekers, which also starred a young Keira Knightley, and other roles soon followed: Jones was in the children's series The Worst Witch, and she played Emma Grundy in The Archers for several years. Still, she decided not to go to drama school and chose to study English literature at university instead, Oxford as it happens, "where I felt I could do both, be in the drama world and study at the same time. I think the benefit is I now have friends in different fields. It can be very intense being an actor, it can be quite a small world. Then you speak to your friend who is a scientist and they have a completely different perspective. It's good to feel [acting is] not the be-all and end-all. Is it David Mamet who says you have to enrich your life and that will make you a better actor? I agree with that."
Were her parents worried about her becoming an actor? "They weren't worried at all. They should have been more worried, but they were both very encouraging. I don't know – now there's no job that's stable, and that was starting to be the case when we were growing up."
She says she looks at the career of Tilda Swinton as one she would like to emulate. "I think she always does things she cares about. I like that she has experimented in other areas, like art installations. She's always exciting." I ask if, as a young female actor, she has felt a pressure to conform to an ideal, and she shakes her head and says, no, she's been lucky. "But for everyone, I think, there is always a pressure to conform, and I guess as you get older you realise it's less interesting to do that. It starts with you, though, saying, 'I know what I like doing and that's what I'm going to do.'"
In the whirlwind that followed Like Crazy, Jones was feted by designers – she modelled for Burberry – and directors, including Woody Allen, asked to meet her. The traditional next step is to move to Hollywood, which she says she would consider temporarily, "but London will always be my home. It's nice to have some continuity you can come back to. I feel that in coming home, coming back to London." She lives with her long-term boyfriend, Ed Fornieles, an artist, and 20 tortoises in the garden. "It's a shared building," she explains; the tortoises belong to everyone and no one. "They're going to outlive us. They all get very hungry and they have to be fed, so I go and check on them in the morning."
She isn't at a point, she says, where she can pick and choose all her roles. "Some things come to me and other things I really have to go and fight for. It's a competitive world. You have to deal with being rejected constantly. It's like being dumped all the time." She laughs. "It's horrible. I wouldn't think of myself as being a particularly strong person, but in order to stick it out you have to be."
Does she watch her own films? "I sometimes like to watch things just to see how I can get better, and also I just like to watch it – if you've spent two months of your life doing something it's nice to see what it became. It's useful to see what went wrong there, why didn't that work, how can I not do that again?" Is she very self-critical? "Yes, absolutely," she says with a smile. "Perfectionism. It's good to do things properly, otherwise there's no point."
• Hysteria is released on 21 September.
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