Felicity Jones makes stance clear on playing backlash to wheelchair-bound The Brutalist character as able-bodied actor
Felicity Jones has spoken up about her role in the critically acclaimed Brady Corbet epic The Brutalist.
The 41-year-old actress plays the wheelchair-bound Erzsebet Toth in the film, the wife of maverick Hungarian-Jewish architect Laszlo Toth (played by Adrian Brody).
The three-and-a-half-hour-long film tells the story of the Toths, having survived the holocaust and horrors of World War Two but separated.
Brody’s character emigrates to the US in pursuit of the American Dream and is eventually reunited with his wife, who has been left wheelchair-bound by illness.
Both he and Jones have been tipped for Oscars glory and the film itself received a huge nine nominations at this year’s Baftas.
The success of the film is in part thanks to the dedication of the actors, who both learned Hungarian and worked on the complex pronunciation with dialogue coaches.
Despite the heavy commitment, Jones was thrilled to take on the project following a period of dissatisfaction with the projects she had been offered beforehand.
“At the time it was sent I was saying no to so many things. I was thinking, am I ever going to work again?” she admitted while speaking with the Radio Times.
However, Jones was convinced taking on The Brutalist was “the right thing to do” after finishing reading its mammoth script.
The scale of the film was another aspect that excited Jones, even though she does not appear until around halfway through.
Jones described the epic film, which has a theatre style interval midway, as being so “old-fashioned, it’s incredibly modern”.
“Brevity has almost become boring,” she declared, slamming the fast-paced environment of the information age.
Even with the film’s success and the actor’s commitment to the project, Jones has faced criticism for portraying a disabled character despite being able-bodied.
Reflecting on taking a wheelchair-bound role, Jones explained her character’s “physical transformation” justified her choice.
In one of the climactic moments of the epic, Erzsebet confronts one of film’s antagonists (played by Guy Pearce) by standing from her wheelchair.
The 41-year-old explained it was this that made it “okay for me, as an able-bodied person, to do.”
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Speaking to Variety, Jones called her new film “an incredible love story”.
Even though she spends much of the epic off screen, the 41-year-old proudly declared her character “is very much present in the beginning of the film; she is there in László. She informs so much of his journey in that first half.”