Oscar nominee Felicity Jones explains why she didn’t mind her limited screen time in The Brutalist

Felicity Jones has been nominated for an Academy Award this year for The Brutalist. The fact, that her character enters the film only towards the second half of the 3-hour-35-minute film, could be the reason why she’s been nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category.

But Felicity attributes her limited screentime to the narrative choice of making the audience feel the weight of the waiting her and Adrien Brody’s characters have to endure before they can reunite. In fact, that’s exactly what drew her to the story.

On limited screentime

“What I liked about the script that there’s this immense wait for these characters to be united. It’s been eight years that they haven’t seen each other. The romance is amped up in the reunion of these two people,” says Felicity. She plays Erzsébet Tóth, the wife of László Tóth (Adrien), a Holocaust survivor who flees to America in order to escape the camp. Erzsébet is left behind, but eventually follows in her husband’s footsteps. She makes it to America and reunites with László even though they must fill the cracks created in their relationship by time, trauma, and displacement.

“What’s wonderful is that it’s quite complex, quite hard for them to, in those very intimate scenes, to rediscover each other. There’s a certain amount of awkwardness. Even when László finds Erzsébet in the bath, he’s a bit flummoxed even though she is his wife. They just haven’t had this level of closeness. So in that scene, you see them working out their intimacy,” Felicity points out. “Also, Erzsébet has such belief, such faith that this relationship has become her God in some way. You see her determination to make that relationship work, even though it’s to her detriment,” she adds.

On power dynamics

It’s not only the distance and displacement that alienate them from each other to an extent. It’s also their conflicting aspirations in a new land, their individual American Dream which stands in the way of their marriage. “There’s a power dynamic going on between László and Erzsébet because both are ambitious individuals, but she’s the one who takes the lone route and the less intellectually stimulated job to support her husband. How often would that happen the other way round? So it’s exploring within their relationship the dynamic between professional success and gender,” Felicity explains.

Erzsébet is journalist while László is an architect. She’s capable of so much more, but like time immemorial, the woman feels the societal urge to take a step back. She may be submissive in comparison, but Felcity still feels it’s a “fleshed out” character. “She’s navigating her ego in relation to someone who has an enormous ego. Two of them have these great egoes. How does she get creative and professional fulfilment? But at the same time, she has great belief in Lazslow’s vision, and it’s a shared vision. She’s paddling underneath like a swan, but there are a lot of questions. What is the balance between both of them? How does she navigate that need for personal, intellectual fulfilment and being with someone who also needs that? I think that’s a huge part of their story.”

Even independent of her equation with László, Erzsébet is “one of the most challenging” parts Felicity has taken on. “Just in terms of the emotional intensity of understanding what someone like Erzsébet would’ve gone through and how that manifests itself physically. It felt like it was something I’d never really done before. In that sense, it felt very personal. To absorb what that person experienced in the camps and to navigate that trauma was definitely something I hadn’t done with the intensity that Erzsébet expresses it.”

The Brutalist releases in Indian cinemas on February 28.