‘Hard Truths’ Michele Austin On her Marianne Jean-Baptiste Friendship

It’s amazing watching Mike Leigh’s film Hard Truths, starring the extraordinary Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin, in an American theater.

Another layer is added as audience members, mostly women at the regular afternoon screening I attended, engaged in the story of two sisters who are the complete antithesis of each other.

Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy is pernickety, house-proud, and after we’ve had our laugh at her, it’s evident that she’s in so much psychological pain, breaking down before our eyes. Austin’s Chantelle, a hairdresser, is more outgoing, more Happy-Go-Lucky, to borrow the title of one of Leigh’s movies.

I loved hearing folk in the cinema sucking their teeth at Pansy’s antics and cooing with approval when Chantelle braided hair. It was comforting, like being in the presence of my, now long gone, judgemental Nigerian aunties. 

Earwigging, after the screening in Century City, I heard people say how they knew Jean-Baptiste but they hadn’t seen Austin before.

They probably had. She’s a chameleon in plain sight that Michele Austin. She buries herself into roles on screen and stage. Years ago, I had to binge on reruns of the TV soap The Bill for an assignment, and I realized I was watching the same actor I’d watched the previous night at the Royal Court Theatre. When I thought about it some more, it was the same Michele Austin I’d seen in countless plays -and several films, a few, as it happens, directed by Leigh.

Jamie Lloyd cast her in Cyrano De Bergerac, which played in the West End and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and in his production of The Effect at the National Theatre. The director Rupert Goold returned to her again and again at the Almeida. And so many of us who have seen Hard Truths have recognized friends and family in Pansy and Chantelle.

“Certainly a lot of people saw relationships between their mums and their aunts. It’s so heartwarming. I cannot stress enough how important it feels to me and how much it warms me to hear that because we are so used to seeing a certain type of Black life being portrayed on the screen. And this for me is certainly a drama about a family, and it’s just wonderful that people connect with it, are connecting with it, recognize themselves, and this is people of all races,“ Austin declares.

Exactly that, and that’s why the film is relating to so many.

Austin nods in agreement: “It is wonderful that it’s universally connecting, but also it’s wonderful that there are Black British people and there were certainly people of Caribbean descent in Toronto and in New York who were saying, ‘Oh my God: This is my family.’ They recognized it. Young people kind of say, “I’m bringing my mom back.”

I know both Pansy and Chantelle. Known them all my life which is probably why the film sent a whopping jolt through me when I saw an early screening at Film4’s offices last summer.

Leigh first cast Austin in his 1992 play It’s A Great Big Shame!, which juxtaposed characters connected to the same East London address in the late Victorian age and the early 1990s. Austin appeared in the second segment, playing a woman being driven to distraction by her endlessly whining husband with Jean-Baptiste as her sibling. The play reopened the Theatre Royal Stratford East, which at the time had been refurbished.

“That was the first time I worked with Mike, and that was the first time I met Marianne and we played sisters in that play. And then after that, we did Secrets and Lies. So this has been the culmination of a 30-year friendship. It’s sort of extraordinary to think, we kind of laugh about it, that we’ve known each other for 30 years and I’ve gone to visit her in LA and things like that. And we hung out and we’ve been through everything together, weddings and babies and the whole nine yards. So this has really been very special, really special,” she tells me. 

Austin says that she’s been in the Mike Leigh club for 30 years. “I’ve dipped in and out. I’ve done nice little bits. So I did some stuff in Another Year and All or Nothing. And so this has been wonderful to just have a little bit more to play with,” noting that Leigh observed that it was  “was about time” he gave her a larger role.

Even though both siblings in Hard Truths have such disparate natures, their souls are somehow in lockstep. Their blood and their memories bind them like glue.

“I think it certainly helps that we’ve known each other a long time and we get each other and there’s a lot of trust there,” she says.

“And actually we make each other laugh a lot. We spent a lot of time laughing and having to be told to calm down. So there’s that shorthand. But I think it’s like anything, you get a job and there’s a script and you turn up at eight o’clock in the morning, you’re in the makeup bus and suddenly Mike introduces you to your husband, and then you’ve got to find some sort of common ground and kind of create an intimacy. So obviously we, Cynthia and I, didn’t have to create intimacy, it was already there,“ although she notes that in real life she is an only child.

“But I’m also an actor and I’m curious about the world and all of that. And of course, I’ve got cousins who are siblings. I’ve got a family where sisters get on, don’t get on, fall out,” she says.

She talks about her mother, lowering her voice as if the woman would pop out of a closet. “Even my mom’s relationship with her sister is very loving, but it’s also very complex. And that’s what those relationships are like. And I think when you think about one’s family, you know that there is love, but there’s also sort of mess and complication and favoritism and all of the complicated things: disappointments, jealousies,” she says.

“You can love your sister but still be jealous of her. She can get on your nerves, but you still need to see her. And so I’m glad that we were able to show that in a way.”

We both laugh because we’ve both got relatives who love each other but when they’re together it’s like you want to go and hide in a bomb shelter. “I’ve got cousins like it, but you’d think that there was going to be war. And also that was really interesting for me as an only child, I always found it fascinating because all I wanted was a little bit of company. So I always found my cousins’ relationships really fascinating. The not sharing or the grabbing of things. I mean, I find all of that. It is really curious. But Marianne has siblings, so she was obviously able to lean on that. “

She says that Leigh’s brilliant at creating the tensions within a relationship. “He knows what he’s doing. He’s been doing it for a long time. So when he’s choosing your characters and you’re building your characters and you are working on it, and you are working on that, the family history, I mean, he is building in things all the time. You only know what your character knows when you’re working with him.

“He doesn’t walk into a room and say, ‘You are going to be this and you are going to be this, and then this thing’s going to happen.’ You really only know what your character knows, it’s literally a film about you as far as you are concerned. So he’s brilliant at just setting little time bombs, little traps for all of the characters, so that by the time you get to the point where you are filming, those things are sort of triggered,” she says, admiring Leigh’s methodology. 

Leigh can tap into the human psyche very well. 

I wondered at what point in the extensive rehearsal process did Austin know she would be playing a hairstylist with two daughters? 

“You build your character up from literally first memory. And for me, it was a first memory that would’ve involved her,”  Pansy, Jean-Baptiste’s character. “She would’ve started with her stuff, and then I’d have come in later as the younger sister. So you start very slowly, you kind of get a feel for where they might end up.

“And that’s based on all the work that you do about whether they went to school, did they go abroad, all of those sorts of things. Did they have a Saturday job? Where they went to church, the whole thing. It became very evident that she was somebody who loves people,  who was able to be around people. That just became, it was sort of obvious really to be honest, that she was going to do something like that with people. 

“And then there was the fun bit where the really amazing production assistant sorted you out going to work in hairdressers and interviewing hairdressers. And they got me lessons. And I actually did learn how to put extensions in which, I was completely convinced that by the time I finished that job, I’d probably have my own salon,” she says, smiling. “I thought, genuinely, I could do this.”

Her own hairdresser allowed her to sit around and observe. “They were amazing. And then I went to another place in Brixton, then another sort of upscale, upscale place in Clapham Junction.”

The owner of the salon in Clapham had been hairdressing since she was a kid and now co-owns the place. “She literally was like Chantelle. She was brilliant. And they got me someone who came in and they got me a proper practice head. So I took it home and it sat in the living room on a stand. And, so obviously, because you’re not supposed to talk about what you’re doing, but obviously when I came home with a hairdresser’s head, the family were just like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And it sat by the sofa because the whole thing for me was I wanted to be able to do the hair as if I’d been doing it for years.”

Austin would sit with this mannequin head in between her knees, watch telly, put extensions in, and make partings. “I was doing that over a course of a few months. But this incredible woman came in and taught me lots of different techniques, some of them I have remembered.“

She loved doing it. “So working with Mike, because he’s curious and he likes to work with nosy, curious people. It’s great. You get to just go to places you’re never able to go to. Marianne was just wildly jealous because all she did was clean pans, never held down a job for longer than a few months. She was very, very good at knowing which cleaning fluid did what.”

The dummy head never had a had a name. “She’s gone now,” Austin says solemnly. “I donated her to someone who might need her, she’s gone to a good home.”

Austin says that she can become “sort of this mad, cynical person.” She explains that “the joke that me and Marianne had, was that I’m probably more Pansy and she’s more Chantelle. That’s the truth,” she says, roaring with laughter as I look dumbfounded.

“Marianne’s funny and warm and open and all of those things. And I think I’m probably more of a cynic than she is,” she admits.

How so, I ask? “It’s this industry that’s ground me down,” she declares.

“I really have had the highs and the lows. It’s really funny because when I hear myself say 30 years, I do kind of go, why? Okay, I’ve done it. I’ve done a lot of stuff. And so that’s why I’m really, really enjoying this. I know it’s hard and I’m not going to pretend that it hasn’t been. And I’m not going to pretend that this industry wasn’t difficult at the start.

 “But I feel really positive about the future. I mean, I know that people are worried about 2025 and productions and things, but I feel very positive about more diverse voices coming out into our industry,” she says as she describes herself as “just a jobbing actor, right?”

For a long time she knew that she wanted to be an actor, but as the daughter born in the UK of parents who had moved to North West London from Jamaica,  she says “being a good immigrant child,”  she sort of ignored her acting dreams and “knew I had to get a proper job.”

Dutifully, she would talk about wanting to be a teacher, but not really believe in going in that direction. But she always loved drama and at school “it’s a classic cliche of an English teacher really taking an interest in me.”

But she was also the class clown, “always too loud” and as an only child she says “I was used to everybody looking at me, my parents looking at me and telling me I was wonderful. And I really was that kid that was sort of in the middle of the room dancing. “

She failed an A-level exam which meant she couldn’t go to university to read humanities. A quick eye roll conveys that studying humanities at Huddersfield University was never going to be in her future if she could help it. All she wanted to do was act.

“And this teacher used to help me on his lunch break, and he helped me with my monologues and I auditioned for drama school and I got in,” she says beaming.

Austin was accepted by Rose Bruford College just outside London in Sidcup, Kent.

When she’s asked to talk to young actors she doesn’t always paint a rosy picture about acting. Rather, she’ll bring up failure because, she says, “sometimes failure is, it might feel awful and the worst thing, but sometimes it’s the best thing. It grounds you. And what’s for you is for you. There are certain jobs that I haven’t got that I get pissed off about, but it is okay. It will find you and you will find it. You keep trucking.”

What I love about how she’s being lauded to the rafters for her Chantelle in Hard Truths on both sides of the Atlantic, is that it didn’t just happen.

She left Rose Bruford and went straight into It’s A Great Big Shame.

”I’ve worked really hard and I’ve been a jobbing actor. I’ve started out and I’ve done the thing and you rock up and you do a couple of scenes in something or you do a couple of episodes of something. And yeah, it has been tough at times, especially when there were jobs that you really want,“ she says, citing, for example, the TV adaptation of Adam Kay’s brutally frank memoir This Is Going to Hurt, about his time as a trainee doctor.  

She read the script and auditioned for the part of Tracy, the senior midwife. She felt, ”I really want to do this” and auditioned coming out of the pandemic. She didn’t know how she would cope not getting it (spoiler: she did get the role).

“And I just remember doing the self-tapes and then having to go in and do a chemistry read, and you go through it to get there. So yeah, you do the work. I’ve worked hard. And so that’s why I’m really enjoying this moment. I’m really enjoying it and unashamedly enjoying it. And actually my cynical head is, or the cynical, intrusive voice is a bit quiet.”

But she feels like stuff will open up for her. The raves she and Jean-Baptiste have received for their performances in Hard Truths have been ecstatic. Also, she notes, “the industry has moved on. I mean a lot of American productions don’t even film in America. They come here or they go all over Europe, so I am aware that that is something that might open up.

“There are more opportunities, but it’s still not perfect. This country’s not perfect. And I mean, you only need to look at the front of a lot of daily newspapers,” she says enraged.

I know exactly what she’s referring to. 

When Wicked premiered in London last November, Cynthia Erivo the star of the film, was not to be found on the front page of any U.K. national daily newspaper. However, they splashed photos of Ariana Grande. 

“See, I don’t even need to say anything to you and you know what I’m about to say. So you see I don’t even know if they know they’re doing it. And we also understand Cynthia Erivo is an amazing talent. She is a once-in-a-lifetime, and we should be, you’d think that she would be celebrated. And that role is the lead. And she was relegated,” Austin says angrily.

I’m moved that she noticed and cares about what happened to Erivo. My gut tells me that angels are looking out for her as well.