February Vogue: Meet Miss Jones
At just 30, Felicity Jones is already a favourite of the British film industry. But her latest film is expected to propel her to global acclaim, says Violet Henderson in the February 2014 issue of Vogue.
In a quiet cafe on a leafy street near Regent's Park, the actress Felicity Jones and I have tea. This isn't the first time that she and I have met: we were contemporaries at Oxford University, where we both studied English - Felicity having decided to give drama school a miss because, as she later tells me, she "wanted another experience", though she always knew that acting was her destiny. I didn't know her well; she was the prodigiously talented girl who didn't get drunk on Thursday nights because - as everyone whispered - she had a part to record on The Archers, the Radio 4 soap opera as British an institution as the university itself. Older than me, and light years ahead in the maturity stakes, Jones's friends were the good-looking artsy crew from Wadham College and she the star in their midst, who effortlessly juggled the two-essays-a-week discipline with acting in every play going. Jones had a certain style: I have a vivid memory of her walking down Broad Street, past the Sheldonian, Christopher Wren's round-fronted theatre, in a blue pinafore, white ruffled lace shirt and pointed brogues. She looked just how you'd hope an undergraduate would look - when, light-deprived and spotty, they normally disappoint.Today, Jones has arrived in an apologetic hurry, only a little late. Her attire is more relaxed than my Oxford memory: she is wearing leggings (for a later yoga class), a blue sweater, the Acne leather jacket she "never takes off", not a scrap of make-up and that peculiarly British brand of dishevelled hair. Not that this lack of effort in any way diminishes her, she is as captivating to watch in person as she is onscreen. One minute she looks like the prettiest girl in school, or the friend you have coffee with before a yoga class, then she will tilt her head or throw back her hair and her beauty is remote and like nothing you've seen before - Burberry and Dolce and Gabbana have both used her for campaigns.
And yet the cafe continues its business, oblivious to her entry, presumably unaware that Jones has been just been nominated for Best Actress by the British Independent Film Awards. I'd happily bet my desk at Vogue that a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for the same film, The Invisible Woman, will shortly follow.
The film, based on the book by Claire Tomalin, is a moody offering, directed by Ralph Fiennes, in which Jones plays Nelly Ternan, the much younger - and ultimately surviving - mistress of superstar author Charles Dickens, played by Fiennes. It has all the elegance, restrained lighting and national significance to become as celebrated as The King's Speech. And, if it doesn't catapult her to cafe-stopping celebrity status (there is a longstanding media preoccupation over when Jones's fame will match her talent), she'll power on to the international big screens in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 this spring, and she's currently filming Theory of Everything, a biopic of Stephen Hawking in which Eddie Redmayne is the scientist, while she plays Jane, his first wife.
Jones herself is jumpy about what these high-profile roles might mean for her. She says she knows that she "can't run away from the public element of my job", but "often the last thing I want to do is stand up in front of 50 cameras on the red carpet. I'd rather have a cup of hot milk and an early night".
A story now enshrined in theatre lore, Jones once turned down a lead role opposite Julia Roberts in the Hollywood blockbuster Mirror Mirror because she had already committed herself to a part in Luise Miller, a Michael Grandage-directed production of the Friedrich Schiller play at the Donmar Warehouse. She tells me the decision was simple: she wanted "to follow her heart". No wonder Bill Nighy, who has taken turns both as her father in the TV thriller Page Eight and her employer in the ever-so-slightly ludicrous romcom Chalet Girl, salutes her as: "Instinctively honest, fine-tuned and not undermined by careerism." The actress never did watch Lily Collins play the part that might have been hers in Mirror Mirror, although she assures me, with clipped consonants and a little, wry smile, "I am sure it was excellent."
Forthright and forceful, Jones knows her own mind. "I make all my decisions by listening to my instinct and then keeping my fingers crossed it will lead to a good place," she says. And she's not prudish in the pursuit of what she wants. After the actress had read the outline for film director Drake Doremus's improvisation project Like Crazy, and decided the part of lovestruck Anna "had to be mine", she made her own audition tape, filming the final scene herself, in her shower. She got the part. "But, by the way," she points out with a knowing giggle, "the tape was only a close-up of my face." Like Crazy turned out to be the runaway indie hit of 2012 and Jones won a Sundance Award.
Last year she worked with Doremus again, this time opposite Guy Pearce, in another improvised heartbreaker, Breathe In.
Jones always wanted to act. "Without sounding too pretentious, I feel my job is almost like becoming a monk or a nun - it's a calling," she says. She was raised in Bournville (the model village outside Birmingham that was built for workers of the Cadbury's chocolate company); her parents divorced when she was three. Jones and her brother lived with their business-consultant mother. She grew up fast.
"I think that my parents' divorce gave me a very strong sense of self-reliance and independence," she says. "I realised that I needed to make sure I could support myself because you don't know what's going to happen in the future." Not yet in secondary school, Jones joined a drama group, Central Junior Television Workshop, to which TV and radio companies would come to hold auditions. By the age of 11 she had her first job, appearing on the ITV children's programme The Worst Witch. Her second job, another children's drama, The Treasure Seekers, featured, she recalls, "my pretty appalling, very earnest performance" alongside a young Keira Knightley. At 15, she won the part of local strumpet Emma Grundy on The Archers, a role she played for a decade.
Crossing her legs and leaning on her arm, Jones sits like a sixth-former in history class. Her minute frame and deliciously rounded cheeks defy her 30 years, as do some of her mannerisms - when she can't remember the name of a director she admires (it turns out to be Andrea Arnold) she covers her eyes with eight small fingers and looks like a child playing an adult. Her voice slips between cut-glass clarity, and something more naive around her "ths" and "fs" which approaches a lisp. It's this chameleon quality that has clearly enchanted the film industry. Ralph Fiennes observes: "She is a totally natural actress who can open a window for the audience. Through her eyes she conveys a rich inner life, full of emotion." And although Jones doesn't go as far as method acting, she'll research each role to within an inch of its life. "Because that's how I can take on a new headspace," she says.
She leaves nothing to chance, not even the smallest detail - if she needs to walk on stage or set with a handbag, she'll fill it with the things she thinks her character would carry, irrespective of whether they are ever seen.
Over our two rounds of peppermint tea, the conversation moves to Girls and Friends, and what each sitcom says about the generation it defines. Having met Lena Dunham"around" and declared herself a massive fan, Jones has just shot an episode on Girls' third series. Friends also with Carey Mulligan, Matt Smith, Luke Treadaway, Matthew Goode and Polly Stenham (Jones was part of the original cast that performed That Face at the Royal Court), she naturally gravitates towards a certain type of British actor: the type that pontificates, likes Shakespeare, treats theatre, film and television as equals, and doesn't stumble out of nightclubs. Stenham praises her friend's mind: "Felicity has a fierce intellect. A mind like a knife. She looks at things intently. Then turns them upside down and looks again. I often think it might not just be acting that we'll know her for. And she's funny. Hellishly."
If this is a new cool British intelligentsia - the Bloomsbury Set relocated to twenty-first-century east London (where Jones and many of her cohorts live) - she seems proud to be a part of it. She says, "It's amazing to think we've always been working, for 10 years now, and together. Yesterday on set I watched Eddie [Redmayne] and Charlie [Cox] do a scene together, and it was so beautiful seeing the subtlety of their acting, how they now know absolutely how to be on camera. I love that we can still support each other." She decides what binds them all together is "seriousness. I think we all feel very lucky to be doing what we do, and we all believe in acting and believe in telling important stories." In recognition of this, and Jones and Redmayne's growing gravitas within the acting world, both actors have been elected to join a Bafta committee, on which Dexter Fletcher and Shane Meadows also sit, to nominate upcoming British talent in film, television and gaming for the Burberry-sponsored Breakthrough Brit Awards.
If Jones could spend our couple of hours together talking only about the academics of acting, she would. She is a reluctant interviewee, whose answers to my questions tend to be short, polite but perfunctory. And yet, after the interview, when my Dictaphone stops rolling, she relaxes and becomes great company. She does a skilful impersonation of a mutual friend and tells funny anecdotes. Her reticence seems to spring from that typical Oxford malaise of overthinking every possible ramification of what she says. She admits, "I'm a horrible perfectionist and very highly strung. That's why I do yoga, to unwind." But like so many people, or women, who suffer from anxiety, her fear is also her energy. She describes what it feels like to wait in a theatre's wings before stepping on stage to perform a new production: "It's so frightening, you feel like you might die during the process, as if you're about to get on a plane that might go down." Her wide eyes become yet rounder. "I call my closest friends and family at that point and they calm me down. But at the same time, when things are frightening, they're often very exciting."
And so, Jones the actress does occasionally relent to Jones the person. I find out she is single: earlier this year she split up from Ed Fornieles, the artist boyfriend she met while she studied at Oxford and he at the Ruskin. But this doesn't mean she'll move to Los Angeles because home is where her family, friends and Radio 4 are. She likes to cook pasta and, occasionally, swim. She has a problem with eating vegetables. She keeps slim through constant worrying. She doesn't Google herself because "you end up reading something negative and it's so depressing". She's a "technological dinosaur" who isn't on any social media. Soon she is going to have some much-needed time off, heading to Mexico with friends. She's very scatty, and has a habit of leaving phones and shoes on trains. And, perhaps most tellingly, she's a massive fan of Virginia Woolf.
Download the February issue of Vogue now here
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