Eager to take difficult role

Vanessa Kirby talks to Andrea Mandell about her acclaimed performance in Pieces of a Woman.

THIS awards season is like no other.

To date there are no red carpets, no galas, no actors' roundtables or flashing photographers.

Instead, when Vanessa Kirby calls recently from across an ocean — where she's back on pandemic lockdown in virusbesieged Britain — the television is showing a riotous mob swarming the US Capitol.

‘‘It's so bizarre,’’ Kirby (32) says of the frenetic news cycle, in the minutes before she and the interviewer realise the unfathomable is about to occur.

But with the world momentarily on pause, the poised Brit opens up about her standout performance in

Pieces of a Woman, which will likely earn the actress her first Oscar nomination.

If you don't think you know Kirby, you probably do: the actress memorably played Princess

Margaret in the first two seasons of

The Crown, and starred alongside Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible —

Fallout. (No stranger to franchises, Kirby also played Hattie Shaw — aka Jason Statham's onscreen sister — in the Fast and Furious spinoff, Hobbs &

Shaw.) But it's the Martin Scorsesebacked Pieces of a Woman that's poised to be her awardsseason vehicle: Kirby won the best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival for her portrayal of a woman whose home birth goes tragically awry.

In the film, Martha (Kirby) and her explosive partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf — we'll get to him later) try to claw their way back to normal, as Martha's intimidating mother (a shining Ellen Burstyn) besieges her to take their midwife to court.

Husbandandwife duo director Kornel Mundruczo and screenwriter Kata Weber, who indirectly share their story of pregnancy loss in Pieces

of a Woman, admit they initially had trouble finding an actress willing to take on the emotionally wrought role.

‘‘It's like Lady Macbeth, it's not easy to go there,’’ Mundruczo says.

But Kirby jumped at it, shadowing midwives in a hospital ahead of portraying a woman giving birth to her first child in an incredible 24minutelong singleshot sequence that launches the film.

She and LaBeouf shot the full scene four times in a row on their first day of filming, and twice the next day.

‘‘We all felt like the most important thing for the birth was to be true and to be as authentic to what birth is really like, not a movie version or a sanitised, edited version of it,’’ Kirby says.

After the fourth take, Mundruczo says Kirby sobbed for 10 minutes as he hugged her: ‘‘And later I just recognised that was exactly the take, what I [would] use for the movie.’’

Kirby, who does not have children, says she faced the experience with a similar anxiety to playing a public figure like Princess Margaret.

‘‘The level of fear was just as great for both those things,’’ the actress says, recalling a plane ride before she began The Crown where she was ‘‘really panicking’’ about doing justice to the royal and ‘‘one of the most unknown love stories of that century, really’’.

‘‘It just seemed so overwhelming that I had to just keep breathing and go, ‘OK, one foot in front of the other’ . . . And I definitely felt like that with Martha, too. I felt like I had to know everything I can about being pregnant and what that feels like as well as labour . . . and do justice to the women that so bravely shared all their stories with me.’’

Burstyn (who delivers a withering bootstraps speech that also has her on the Oscar radar) recalls inviting Kirby for a sleepover in her New York City apartment before filming. The two bonded over Burstyn's homemade dinner of salmon and salad.

‘‘She's a very sensitive person, very smart and talented and kind, empathic,’’ the actress says of Kirby.

‘‘She's very easy to love, so my maternal instincts were activated pretty quickly.’’

Then there's the LaBeouf of it all. While Pieces of a Woman isa showcase for its female stars, it arrives somewhat stymied by LaBeouf, who plays Martha's combative significant other. Some may find his aggressive tactics on screen hard to stomach after a lawsuit was filed against the actor by his exgirlfriend FKA twigs, alleging repeated abuse and assaults.

When asked about releasing the film amid LaBeouf's headlines, Kirby, who has publicly stated she stands with all survivors of abuse, says she's proud of ‘‘the story of female courage’’ that drives the movie.

‘‘Hopefully it does justice to the women that sat with me and talked about their experiences of losing a baby. Because society finds it really uncomfortable. We know from Chrissy Teigen and Meghan Markle and the reactions [to their stories] that it's a new thing to be talking about.’’

For now, Kirby, a selfidentified peopleperson, is under lockdown — again — in Britain. Eventually, she'll go back to work on the seventh

Mission: Impossible film.

‘‘I'm not quite sure what that plan is actually yet. I'm sure they're trying to figure it out,’’ she says.

At that, she signed off. The TV volume went back up. And the world changed again. — TNS

µ Pieces of a Woman is available to

stream on Netflix.