‘The Brutalist’ Star Felicity Jones Breaks Down 3 Scenes That Define Her Profound Performance

[Editor’s note: The following interview contains some spoilers for “The Brutalist.”]

Felicity Jones still remembers what it was like to get the script for Brady Corbet’s ambitious epic “The Brutalist.” The script, written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold and clocking in at a supersized 131 pages, was “very dense” and “hefty, even in its paper form.” Jones couldn’t recall reading a script like it.

“The emotional intelligence really struck me. It felt very grown up, and it had this power,” Jones said during a recent interview with IndieWire. “I remember being incredibly moved by the story. It really just struck me so deeply on reading it. Just seeing the ambition, even at the level of the script, with the intermission and the title cards, and how it fully immersed you in this world, it felt like the people behind this had a really keen understanding of the power of cinema.”

Corbet’s film follows Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody, in a lauded performance) as he sacrifices nearly everything to achieve his dreams of bringing Brutalist architecture to his newfound American home. That means a protracted separation from his beloved wife Erzsébet Tóth (Jones), a fraught partnership with the nefarious millionaire Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), and numerous attempts at building a sprawling community center in Doylestown, PA.

“I knew that I wanted to work with someone who had a very distinctive vision, I was looking for someone like Brady to work with,” Jones said. “He is so singular in his work, and I was really keen to work with someone who had that singularity. … He’s an excellent leader. He’s very collaborative, but at the same time, he knows what his vision is. You feel like you are all being steered in the right direction.”

As Erzsébet, Jones serves as the heart of the film — though her now-Golden Globe-nominated performance is a profound combination of emotional, mental, and physical exertions, one that required the Oscar nominee to bring her full self to the part. And with Corbet, himself a former actor, Jones said she found a level of trust that pushed her to new levels.

“I think the power of being an actor and then [moving into] directing is that you really trust your casting,” the actress said. “Brady trusted his casting, and he actually even said once that, for anyone to want to do those parts, he realized that, to a certain extent, they were ready. An actor wouldn’t take it on unless they felt like they were able to do something with it.”

Ahead, Jones walks IndieWire through three pivotal moments in “The Brutalist” — a trio of sequences she was very much ready to truly do something with — and how she shaped her remarkable work to fully capture their importance. For each scene, we’re also including a snippet of Corbet and Fastvold’s script (which you can read here) to fully set the stage.

1. The Reunion

“ZSÓFIA, a transcendent beauty, scans the platform and begins pushing ERZSÉBET in a wheelchair along the platform. WE TRACK RIGHT with ERZSÉBET in profile who begins to cry at the sound of LÁSZLÓ’s voice. She’s older than the wedding photo seen prior. Her face is agonized and gaunt but her expression betrays some optimism. TRACK LEFT with LÁSZLÓ as his brow furrows with concern. THE CAMERA CONTINUES TO SWING LEFT with LÁSZLÓ until they share the frame. He bends to his wife.”

For the first half of the film, Jones’ Erzsébet exists only as receptacles of László’s traumatized memory and deep desire, and though we don’t see her, we often hear her in voiceover, reading her letters to an eager László. The actress does not appear onscreen until after the film’s much-vaunted intermission. The reunion is not everything László has dreamed: He’s stunned — like the audience — to see his beloved wife arrive on a train platform in a wheelchair. It’s instantly clear that, while we’ve all been so steeped in László’s pain and grief, his soulmate has been enduring her own trials he cannot possibly imagine.

‘The Brutalist’A24

Marrying that tension between the shock of the encounter and the enduring desire for it was top of mind for both Jones and Brody. The pair briefly met on Zoom before production on the film began, mostly spending their preparation time digging into their own characters, not the deep bond between them.

“I find a lot of it is quite boring, hard work, and just repetition,” Jones said of her prep work for the part. “With the accent, you’re just practicing, and practicing, and practicing, and listening. I had a vocal sample that I was using that was a woman with a similar socioeconomic background to Erzsébet. You’re making everything feel as effortless as possible, by putting in as much hard work before that, so that when you come to do it on the day, it feels like you are that person. All the technical sides have to become subconscious, so that when you open your mouth, you’re just in the moment.”

When Jones and Brody finally met in person, the experience echoed what they were preparing to play in the film itself. “I remember us meeting in Hungary, in the hotel that we were all staying in, and it was quite emotional, because we’d spent so much time individually with these characters that we were both quite moved in seeing each other, because we knew what was ahead of us,” Jones said. “We knew there was a lot we had to achieve.”

Despite all of her hard work and intense preparation, Jones admitted to feeling overwhelmed as shooting approached, particularly as she considered the technical needs of Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley and the emotionality she and Brody would need to display.

‘The Brutalist’Courtesy Everett Collection

“It was such an immense moment, and I knew that Brady and Lol had a really specific shot they wanted to get, in this single shot,” she said. “I was apprehensive before we did that scene. I even blanked in rehearsal, I just completely blanked my lines, which doesn’t usually happen. I think that the intensity of it, and knowing how much this moment meant, it was almost like I was having a psychological reaction.”

She attributes much of the success of the reunion to Brody’s presence, and the way in which the two actors attempted — and, ultimately, truly felt — the bond between László and Erzsébet. “Adrien has such an emotional power, and the two of us, we just were in the heads of those characters,” Jones said. “So, it was quite a moving moment to portray because you think, ‘Oh, they’ve waited so long to be reunited.'”

2. The Release

“The room is very dark. The two of them make love. A cock, an elbow, an arched back. An intense, physical dream.”

The pair ultimately struggle to fully reconnect after their tear-stained reunion. The years tick by, and László continues to try to square his professional ambitions with the oppressive power of the Van Burens, while Erzsébet slowly gets better, and even alights on a career of her own (helped, of course, by the Van Burens). The initial, immediate joy of their reunion burns off, and the couple is forced to move around each other, through each other, never quite fused back together in the ways they’ve long hoped.

Alas, more trauma awaits them, and is ultimately what pushes them back together — and then almost irrevocably apart. After a series of losses, including a horrific experience in Italy inflicted on László by Harrison, their beloved niece moving to Israel to start her own adult life, and the continued sense that the Doylestown center will never be completed, the Tóths seem poised to finally fracture.

But László sees another possibility: ailing one night from pain that’s as much emotional as it is physical, László attempts to soothe his wife not with her prescription medication, but the heroin he’s long been (not-so-secretly) addicted to. The early euphoria of the drug burns out in terrifying fashion, but before that, Erzsébet enters a state of ecstasy that previously seemed unavailable to her. And she and László finally make love.

‘The Brutalist’Courtesy Everett Collection

“There is this whole carnal side of Erzsébet and László that is very interesting,” Jones said. “Those moments are both physical and emotional, and she’s the one very much fusing that. They were like Isabelle Huppert-type scenes, something like ‘The Piano Teacher’ infused much of my thinking for those moments. You need those moments because they’re so intimate. The film [has this] scope and then this, I imagine for the audience, they’re quite intense moments, because of their intimacy, and you are allowed into very private moments of these characters.”

To stay locked in during these moments, moments that are just as physical as they are emotional, Jones returned to her guiding star: Corbet and Fastvold’s script, and the ways it not only crafts these moments, but all of the essential moments leading to it.

“The lines just anchor you and tether you, and in that moment, you are understanding the intensity of their connection, and that the thought of each other has gotten them through the traumatic experiences that they have gone through,” Jones said. “The desire to be together is what has maintained, particularly for Erzsébet, her survival. And, in that moment, you get the fusion of all of that, the sexual [longing], the trauma, the intimacy, the love, the pain. But that is all achieved through the writing and the acting.”

3. The Reveal

“ERZSÉBET waits in the hallway, she dabs her forehead with her handkerchief exhausted from the walk.”

It’s during those previous scenes of release (and near-death) that László reveals to his wife the full extent of the trauma Harrison Van Buren has inflicted on him. Erzsébet, fueled by a potent mix of her rage, pain, and abiding sense of right and wrong, does something previously unimaginable: she takes herself to the Van Buren estate, walks (!!) right in the front door, and accuses Harrison of a litany of heinous acts, all in front of his own family and a coterie of business associates. It’s gobsmacking stuff, equal parts horrifying and heroic.

‘The Brutalist’Courtesy Everett Collection

“Well, it’s her superhero moment, really. This is the challenge that she has to rise to,” Jones said. “It was definitely a key scene in [choosing] why I wanted to play the role. Van Buren thinks he should have all the power because of his wealth, and he believes that gives him the right to do whatever he wants. She is defying that, and she is saying, ‘Dignity comes from other places and you don’t have the dignity that you should have.'”

In reflecting on the scene, Jones was quick to look outside her own extensive internal work, pointing to the other performers and characters that helped guide her through such a demanding piece of acting.

“The Van Burens aren’t used to people pushing back at them, they are autocrats, in many ways, and autocrats don’t really like defiance,” Jones said. “[Pearce] plays him like a matinee idol. It’s such a good way of entering the character because then you can allow for all the charm, it’s so necessary for that person. But Van Buren is, he’s a pretty damaged human being, as well.”

But it’s not only bad Van Burens that assist Erzsébet; it’s also the ones willing to face down the corrupt and corrosive power of the family tree, like Stacy Martin as Harrison’s daughter Maggie Lee. Tucked into all the pain and fear of this pivotal sequence, there are moments of profound intimacy and respect between Erzsébet and Maggie.

“One other thing I love in that moment is that, between Erzsébet and Stacy’s character Maggie Lee, [you see] they have built up a measure of friendship,” Jones said. “It’s quite nice, that’s why this script is so special, because it’s not all black and white. You can see that there’s a friendship that has occurred between these women, and you can feel that [all the] Van Burens, everyone, in a way, they have become how they are because of a certain amount of trauma. It’s complex. It’s not goodies and baddies.”

‘The Brutalist’Courtesy Everett Collection

Much like the reunion scene, pulling off this “superhero” moment — and one of Jones’ most explosive and edifying in her impressive career — required a fusion of technique and emotion that pushed her to new levels of emotion and expression.

“It was quite a moment, and we were all well-aware of that, it was a bit like a twin to the train scene, in that it was quite highly-choreographed,” she said. “There were a lot of elements that we had to get right, and really so much pressure on Lol, who was also operating [the camera]. You want it all to come together but not look in any way inorganic. That balance of the design of the shot with the immediacy of the emotions, it was quite complex to get that all to come together. But I think, because of the type of story we were telling, we as actors, you intuit the importance of the moment. You really bring your A game to it.”

A24 will release “The Brutalist” in theaters on Friday, December 20.