Leslie Jones is a stand-up who acts, and it shows in the best way: she puts weight on plain sentences until they turn into jokes. Films that write her lines get the laughs. Films that only want her exasperated get a face.
Fi1m perspective
Patty Tolan, in Ghostbusters (2016), is a subway worker who knows the history of every building in Manhattan, and Leslie Jones plays her as if she were the only adult present. The others have theories; Patty has facts, and she states them in a voice that expects to be ignored and is not surprised when it is. She gets the best plain-spoken lines in the film and a laugh from nearly every one of them. That is the Jones we want to see, and it is rarer on screen than it should be.
She came to films late and from the clubs. She began stand-up in 1987 after winning a campus contest, moved to Los Angeles, worked days and played nights, and did not get an hour-long special, Problem Child, until 2010. Chris Rock saw her perform in 2012, put her in Top Five (2014) and recommended her to Saturday Night Live, which hired her as a writer in 2014, moved her in front of the cameras the same year and kept her there until she left after the 2018–19 season. Around that came a small part in Trainwreck (2015) written for her, Paul Feig's Ghostbusters, voice work in Sing (2016) and The Angry Birds Movie 2 (2019), and Coming 2 America (2021). She hosted Supermarket Sweep for two years and made a stand-up special, Time Machine, in 2020. The stage has never stopped being the main job.
That matters, because what she does on screen is a stand-up's trick: she takes an ordinary sentence and leans on it until it becomes a joke. In Ghostbusters we laughed at nearly everything Patty said, and it was the delivery doing it, the flat, tired reasonableness of a woman who has explained the same thing to tourists a thousand times and is now explaining it to physicists. Feig understood that the character needed lines rather than reactions, and the script gave her lines.
Charlie Brooker's Death to 2020 (2020) gives her neither. Her Dr. Maggie Gravel is on hand mostly to be exasperated, alongside Samson Kayo's Pyrex Flask, and exasperation is not a part. It is a face, and any competent actor can pull it. Jones can do a great deal more than that, but only when someone has written it down first, and in Brooker's film the news clips were doing most of the talking.
So the caveat is a simple one. Her screen career is still far shorter than her club career, and the parts have tended to the boisterous and outspoken, which uses her height and her timing and leaves the rest at home. Give her a full sentence and she will get the laugh. Give her a face to pull and she will pull it, and the film will have got exactly what it paid for.
Biography
Leslie Jones is an American stand-up comedian and actress. Born Annette Leslie Jones on 7 September 1967 in Memphis, Tennessee, she attended Chapman University and Colorado State University. She joined the cast and writing staff of the NBC sketch series Saturday Night Live in 2014, remaining until 2019, and hosted the game show Supermarket Sweep.
Jones starred as Patty Tolan in the 2016 film Ghostbusters. Her other screen credits include the voice of Meena's mother in Sing (2016), an appearance in Trainwreck (2015), the voice of Zeta in The Angry Birds Movie 2 (2019), Mary Junson in Coming 2 America (2021), and the role of Charlotte Reed in Good Burger 2 (2023). She has released comedy specials including Problem Child (2010) and Time Machine (2020).
