Felicity Jones makes affection look like something that takes effort, and gives supportive characters a sharpness of their own. We rate that precision, though her films can be less searching than her performances.
Fi1m perspective
Felicity Jones can make an attentive face look tired without making the attention seem false. As Jane Hawking in James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything (2014), she gives affection a visible cost, allowing frustration into a performance that could have settled for patient encouragement. We were moved by her tiredness because she made being kind look like work. Opposite Eddie Redmayne, she listens and responds rather than politely waiting to take over the scene. The film is worth seeing for the two of them, though Marsh is too reluctant to press Jane’s difficulties further.
Like Crazy (2011) was her breakthrough, and The Theory of Everything brought wider recognition. She then played Jyn Erso in the studio film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On the Basis of Sex (2018). The Brutalist (2024) brought her back to independent cinema. She is often cast as resilient, intellectually driven women, but she is more interesting when they are allowed to be irritable.
In Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, her Erzsébet Tóth is sharp-tongued and hard to fool. At the kitchen table with Adrien Brody, she makes László seem to have an equal, and those exchanges give Jones something firmer to do than offer encouragement. She can be blunt without making the character merely disagreeable. Corbet’s film loses its way in its second half, but her performance is one of the reasons to stay with it. The frustration is with a story that keeps insisting on points it has already made.
The reservation is that these films ask her to spend so much time responding to the man beside her. She is good enough at it that the limitation can pass unnoticed, particularly when Redmayne or Brody gives her something substantial to answer. We would like more parts that let her begin the conversation and determine where it goes. Start with The Theory of Everything for the performance, but do not expect the script to be as candid about Jane as Jones is.
Biography
Felicity Jones is an English actress. She began her professional career as a child, appearing in The Treasure Seekers (1996) and playing Ethel Hallow in one series of The Worst Witch (1998). In 2008 she appeared in the Donmar Warehouse production of The Chalk Garden.
Jones is known for her performances in Like Crazy (2011), The Theory of Everything (2014) as Jane Hawking, for which she received BAFTA and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) as Jyn Erso. She has also appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), Inferno (2016), A Monster Calls (2016), On the Basis of Sex (2018), The Aeronauts (2019) and The Midnight Sky (2020). In The Brutalist (2024) she played Erzsébet Tóth and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
She studied English at Wadham College, Oxford.
