A RISING STAR IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY
Felicity Jones and her breakthrough in RogueOne, opening next week
Some weeks ago Felicity Jones was strolling the streets of London when she was stopped by a woman she described as “very tall and very model-y looking”, who politely asked to take a picture with her. Jones, an Academy Award-nominated actress, gladly obliged, then walked a short distance before she was stopped by another passer-by. “Who was that?” this pedestrian asked her.
As a humbled Jones recounted this exchange, saying: “I just went, ‘I don’t know, but she seems cool!’.”
She added: “My feet are kept, very much, firmly, firmly on the ground.”
This is what it means to be Jones, 33, who, the British actress and fashion star whose career was exponentially accelerated by the critical and commercial success of The Theory Of Everything (2014), the biographical film about physicist Stephen Hawking.
By other assessments, including her own, she is hardly worthy of recognition, just a diligent performer whose resumé includes some modest cult favourites such as Like Crazy (2011) and some big-budget crowd-pleasers such as the current Inferno.
Whatever claims to obscurity she can still make will not last long after the Dec 16 release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. In this latest chapter of the epic outer-space adventure, Jones plays Jyn Erso, the scrappy and unlikely leader of a team of rebel fighters tasked with stealing the plans for the Galactic Empire’s planet-killing war machine, the Death Star. As fans know, these are the events that precede the original franchise instalment, Star Wars: A New Hope (1977).
Rogue One could be a breakthrough opportunity for Jones, who is not usually seen swinging her fists or piloting interstellar vessels in tentpole action movies. It could also be an opportunity for the makers of the Star Wars series, who in recent films have featured women more prominently.
True to her own unassuming spirit, Jones played down these possibilities in a conversation, speaking by Skype from a patio at a Los Angeles hotel, instead emphasising her passion for strong, relatable characters in whatever form they take.
“It’s hard to find an indie that has a great female lead — it’s hard to find anything,” Jones said.
“We wanted the audience to relate to Jyn as a person,” she added. “Like all of us, she’s trying to work out what the hell to do.”
The filmmakers and co-stars who have worked with her over the years say that this is typical of Jones, who would rather keep her head down and work than look up and see where her accomplishments are taking her.
“When you meet Felicity, it doesn’t really add up,” said Gareth Edwards, director of Rogue One. “She’s incredibly — and I mean this in a positive way — incredibly normal. None of this, so far at least, has in any way affected her. It’s kind of remarkable.”
Born and raised in Birmingham, England, Jones said that she came from a “family culture of education being prized and important, and having a balance — I wasn’t a Judy Garland-type child actress”. (She did, nonetheless, appear on television shows such as The Worst Witch (1998-1999) and its 2001-2002 sequel, Weirdsister College.)
Another treasured household ritual, she said, was piling into the car with her parents and brother to drive 90 minutes to the nearest multiplex and see whatever was playing. As a result Jones grew up admiring idiosyncratic actresses like Christina Ricci in The Addams Family (1991) and Samantha Morton in Morvern Callar (2002).
After graduating from Oxford, Jones moved to London to pursue acting fulltime, appearing in stage productions at the Donmar Warehouse and getting a crucial break in a 2007 television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. (“It was a fusion of studying English at university and being a fan of Jane Austen, as all English women should be,” she said wryly.)
The film that helped bring Jones to America’s attention was Like Crazy (2011), which cast her and Anton Yelchin as young lovers trying to maintain a trans-Atlantic relationship.
Directed by Drake Doremus from a lengthy outline rather than a traditional script, Like Crazy required Jones to invent large swathes of her own dialogue, including a romantic poem that her character reads to Yelchin in a tender moment on their bed.
“I’ve had people send me pictures of that poem tattooed on their bodies,” Doremus said in a separate interview. “It’s a tribute to her.”
Like Crazy has become a bittersweet bond for Jones and Doremus, who reconnected after Yelchin’s accidental death in June. “It still doesn’t quite feel real and make sense,” Doremus said. “He’s just in everything we do, and influences everything we do.”
What Doremus said has stayed with him about Jones’ performance was how she set aside self-consciousness to play such an open and vulnerable character.
“The cool thing about Felicity is, she’s not an actor, she’s a person,” he said, “and there are a lot of people out there that are actors first and people second.”
Keeping those spheres of her life separate became a greater challenge after The Theory Of Everything, in which she played Jane Hawking, then the wife of the acclaimed physicist (Eddie Redmayne), who cared for him as he was disabled by a motor-neuron disease. The success of the film, for which Redmayne won an Oscar as best actor and Jones was nominated as best actress, still startles her. Jones said that they approached the movie no differently than they would an intimate independent feature.
“One of my favourite films is Splendor In The Grass (1961),” she said, “and we would try to emulate those naturalistic, impassioned performances.”
She added: “When you hear the two magic words — which are ‘It works’ — then you know something has come together.”
Edwards, whose credits include Monsters (2010) and the 2014 remake of Godzilla, said that Rogue One deliberately reverses some of the tropes of the original Star Wars trilogy and the story of Luke Skywalker.
“A New Hope is the story of a boy who grows up in a tranquil home and dreams of joining a war,” he said. “What if we have the story of a girl who grows up in a war and dreams of returning to the tranquillity of home?”
To that end, Edwards said, he was not looking for “an action star in the classic sense — the clichéd expectation of a soldier or a rebel”.
“You can teach anyone to fight, with enough stunt training,” he said. “But you can’t teach someone to have that soul in their eyes. Whenever you point the camera at Felicity, there’s just so much going on inside.”
The casting of women in the lead roles of fantasy films like Rogue One, The Force Awakens and Ghostbusters (2016) has proven unexpectedly provocative, drawing the ire of those few frustrated fans who call it a concession to political correctness.
Jones sidestepped this issue, saying that “we wanted the audience to relate to Jyn as a person, whether you’re a boy or a girl, a man or a woman”.
Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm, the production company that makes the Star Wars films, was more direct about whether she felt she had to placate these critics.
“I have a responsibility to the company that I work with,” she said.
“I don’t feel that I have a responsibility to cater in some way.”
She added: “I would never just seize on saying, ‘Well, this is a franchise that’s appealed primarily to men for many, many years, and therefore I owe men something’.”