'Actors are lucky in being able to retain that playfulness, though we do seem to find it hard to grow up,' says Felicity
As part of the research for her new movie, Felicity Jones interned at a Los Angeles style magazine called Flaunt. ‘It was a slightly bizarre experience,’ she laughs. ‘They seemed to be obsessed with coolness, trying to work out who was the coolest person on the planet at any given moment.’
The answer may well have been right under their noses. Over the past few years, Felicity has become one of the hottest, and therefore coolest, actresses around, proving equally adept at costume drama and contemporary romantic comedy. She’s matey with Carey Mulligan and recently experienced the modern rite of passage for every Bright Young British Thing by appearing in a Burberry ad. Official validation came when she won the Special Jury Prize at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival for her role as Anna, an English girl experiencing the joys and ravages of first love in Los Angeles, in the low-budget movie Like Crazy. ‘That was a truly surreal experience,’ she says, curled into a chair in a London publicist’s office and eyeing a tray of cakes that have been shipped in from a nearby patisserie. ‘I’m still trying to make sense of it all.’
Despite the rigours of a full-on press junket, Felicity is displaying all the winningly gauche charm of an ingénue, albeit one with a penchant for fashion-forward polka-dot blouses and precipitously heeled ankle boots. She giggles a lot, fiddles with her choppily bobbed hair, only notices that she’s spilled tea on her skirt when proffered a paper towel, makes liberal, wide-eyed use of the words ‘bizarre’ and ‘unusual’, and altogether seems a lot younger than her 28 years. But that was surely one of the reasons that Like Crazy’s young director Drake Doremus seized on her to play Anna, who ages from 19 to 27 during the movie’s span. The other clinching factor was Felicity’s unorthodox audition tape: she climbed into her bathroom shower to shoot an approximation of the movie’s final, emotionally climactic scene.
‘You just have to take these opportunities when they come along,’ she shrugs, while tucking into a slice of apple tart. ‘They’re not that frequent; you’ll get a really good script, oh, maybe once a year if you’re lucky. So I tried to think outside the box a bit, and I set up a camera in my flat. Drake said he couldn’t see my face most of the time because the lighting was so bad,’ she says. ‘He took a big chance, casting me from this grainy tape. But then, this whole film was about going out on a limb.’
Felicity is referring to Doremus’s modus operandi: he gets his actors to improvise their dialogue around a bare outline. Thus, all Felicity knew about Like Crazy was that Anna, a media-studies student at college in California, falls head over heels in love with a furniture designer named Jacob (Anton Yelchin), only to see the relationship challenged when she overstays her visa and is unable to return to the US. The film is searingly intimate – most of its 90-minute running time consists of close-ups of Anton’s and Felicity’s faces – and Anton says that, while he and Felicity indeed felt that they were going crazy sometimes, ‘it was an extraordinary feeling to create a character from the inside out’. Felicity concurs: ‘I love the fact that Drake puts the characters first, but I also loved the way the story was told. It looks at this relationship in a very honest, unsentimental way, and it really understands the intricacies and complications of love, where things aren’t easy or tidy. I felt I could really get my teeth into it.’
And despite the shoestring exigencies (she did her own hair and make-up for Like Crazy and wore her own clothes), Felicity is obviously keen for more, having already completed Doremus’s as yet untitled follow-up. So how does she choose her roles? ‘I’m a masochist in some ways,’ she grins. ‘I look for things that I think I can’t do, then, for some bizarre reason, I really want to do them. Maybe one day I’ll take the easy route.’
With every script, she says, she looks for a way into the character – ‘Is there something weird about them?
What’s the hook?’ For Anna, it was ‘her obsessive quality; she makes all the running in the relationship, which is quite unusual. I think she feels freer because she’s displaced in LA, and as an actor, you’re always being plonked down in new environments and situations, so I understood her psychologically.’
Felicity also knows a thing or two about first love (‘I’ve felt it, of course – that pulling out of the rug from under your feet’) and long-distance relationships: she once got on a plane without telling her then boyfriend that she was on her way, and travelled 16 hours before knocking on his door. ‘Luckily, he was at home – and he was alone,’ she grins. ‘But being an actor, relationships are permanently long distance.’
‘I love the way the story in Like Crazy looks at the intricacies and complications of love, where things aren’t easy or tidy’
As she discusses her profession, it becomes apparent that behind the guileless façade lurks the methodical, academic sensibility that gained her a 2:1 in English from Wadham College, Oxford. She stayed with a Catholic family before taking on the role of the devout-but-doomed heroine in the Donmar Warehouse’s production of Luise Miller, and she did two months of snowboard training, followed by an undercover stint scrubbing toilets and partying at après-ski bars before playing Kim, the tomboy from the wrong side of the tracks who falls for her boss’s son, Ed Westwick, in last year’s romantic comedy Chalet Girl. ‘It does sound a bit methody, doesn’t it?’ she laughs. ‘But for me, acting’s about losing myself in a role. The last thing I want is to draw attention to myself. I want the person I’m playing to be as real as possible.’ She smooths her skirt. ‘As a child, I always liked dressing up and getting into character, and actors are lucky in being able to retain that playfulness, though we do seem to find it hard to grow up,’ she says.
For Felicity, that childlike quality seems to have cohabited with a wilful, independent streak. She was born and brought up in Bournville, the model village just south of Birmingham planned and built by the Cadbury family for factory workers. ‘There were a lot of perfectly manicured privet hedges,’ she laughs.
Her parents met while working at the Wolverhampton Express & Star; her father was a journalist and her mother was in the advertising department. They divorced when Felicity was three; she and her younger brother were raised by her mother. And, while Felicity stresses that they all remained close and that her childhood was a happy one, it’s clear that the episode provided an early close-up into the schisms of the adult world. ‘I think it kind of showed that things don’t always pan out, that they’re not always as comfortable as they seem.’ Perhaps this is when Felicity got the taste for inventing her own parallel worlds. Pretty soon she was acting in school plays, encouraged by her parents and by her uncle, the actor Michael Hadley. ‘We were always encouraged to go off and try things out,’ she shrugs. ‘My brother went to France when he was 16 and worked in a guest house, learning French.’ (He now works as a film editor.) Felicity got her first screen role at 11, in an adaptation of E Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers, alongside a young Keira Knightley (‘We all felt, even then, that she’d go on to big things,’ she has said of her co-star. ‘She just had a presence’).
A year later, she was playing the bullying harridan Ethel Hallow in the ITV children’s show The Worst Witch; at 15 she embarked on a decade of playing the teen tearaway Emma Grundy in The Archers on Radio 4, and at 17 she was back playing Ethel Hallow in Weirdsister College, and availing herself of a private tutor to get her through her A-levels. ‘Up to that point it had all been a bit of a lark,’ she says. ‘It was only after university that I said to myself that I had to take the risk and have a serious go at acting. It’s such a bizarre profession, because you have to be totally tough to deal with all those times when you’re being turned down, and then really soft in order to access your character’s emotions. You need to be either terribly sane or terribly insane. I’m not quite sure which of those I am.’
While her sanity may be in question, her ability is not. She has played everything from Miranda in the movie version of The Tempest, alongside Helen Mirren as Prospera, to the fresh-faced Julie in Ricky Gervais’s comedy Cemetery Junction. In 2007 she starred alongside Carey Mulligan in an ITV adaptation of Northanger Abbey, where they became friends. ‘It was one of our first jobs, and we both had this excitement of being at the beginning of things,’ says Felicity. It is Carey Mulligan who has forged a stellar Hollywood career, despite being just a year and a bit older than Felicity, but she says that she doesn’t measure herself against her, or Keira Knightley, or anyone else. ‘I maybe did that a bit when I was first starting out,’ she concedes, with a grin, ‘but the more work you do, the more confident you become. Comparisons are a product of insecurity, because you really can’t control things that much in this job. As long as you go after a part you really want when one comes along, that’s all you can really do.’ She pauses. ‘Doing Like Crazy felt like a shift to me; I suddenly realised that I didn’t need to worry so much, and became more relaxed. It was definitely a bit of a turning point.’
There’s certainly a Hollywood buzz building around Felicity; both Up in the Air director Jason Reitman and mogul Harvey Weinstein are believed to be courting her for their next projects, and she’s already completed a Victorian comedy called Hysteria (with Hugh Dancy and Maggie Gyllenhaal). But she continues to be based in London rather than LA, and namechecks edgy British director Andrea Arnold (Red Road, the new version of Wuthering Heights) as someone she’d love to work with. ‘I like directors who care about performance, because, in the end, you’re only as good as they allow you to be,’ Felicity says breezily. Meanwhile, she’s currently living out of a suitcase, and trying to make time for her boyfriend, artist Ed Fornieles. The pair met at Oxford, when he was at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, and they live in the artistic mecca of East London, though any further enquiries are met with a polite but firm rebuttal. Felicity’s father, who obviously knew about such things, once advised her never to trust a journalist, and while she’s unfailingly civil and forthcoming about her craft, there are certain areas she prefers not to discuss. ‘I think he meant I should maintain a sense of privacy,’ she says. ‘Not to be guarded exactly, but not to tell everybody everything.’
The trouble is, the more prominent she gets, the more intrusive the interest will be. Is she ready for that? She frowns. ‘I’ll just keep doing what I do, and hopefully the rest will take care of itself,’ says Felicity Jones, in her ineffably cool kind of way.
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