So she returned to London for three and a half months of rehearsals. To create Pansy, she was tasked with thinking about real people in her life, drawing out traits and details to construct someone entirely new. Then she had to work out every detail of that character’s life: what their childhood was like, where they went to school, what their teacher’s name was, how they felt about their family. “There’s no other job where you have as much agency as an actor, where it is as collaborative. It’s a roller-coaster ride, man.”
On set, she and Leigh worked together to improvise all of Pansy’s dialogue. She helped curate what was in her cupboards (“They brought this hot pepper sauce, and I was like, ‘No, she’d have Encona.’”). She compiled lists of everything her character hates or is scared of. She even went out onto the streets of the capital in character, just to see it through Pansy’s eyes. “She has all these intrusive thoughts,” Jean-Baptiste sighs. “It was tiring at times, heavy and hard to switch off. I just had to go, Oh, shut up.”
Ultimately, this commitment is what makes Pansy feel so real and why, I expect, following the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, so many audience members told the actor that she reminded them of their grandmothers, aunties, mother-in-laws, or sister-in-laws. Jean-Baptiste cracks up at the memory. “I was like, ‘Dude… that’s very specific.’”
Raised in Peckham, in southeast London, in the ’70s by an Antiguan carer mother and a St. Lucian laborer father, Jean-Baptiste grew up running around their building, riding bikes, and playing rounders with her sister and two brothers. She loved performing too, doing various school theater workshops until she landed a spot at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she studied while also working as an usher at the Empire cinema in Leicester Square. “I think it helped that I lived at home still and went back to reality every day, so I didn’t get caught up in the drama of school as much.”
Then came a flurry of stage work, including her first encounter with Leigh, for his 1993 play It’s a Great Big Shame!, before Secrets & Lies paved the way for her to work in the US. Since then, she’s hopped between both sides of the pond, appearing in the likes of Broadchurch, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, Prime Video’s Homecoming, the A24 horror In Fabric, and biblical drama The Book of Clarence, though she’s best known for her SAG Award-nominated role as the steely special agent Vivian Johnson across seven seasons of CBS’s Without a Trace.
