Jeananne Craig talks to English actress, Oxford graduate and Dolce & Gabbana model Felicity Jones about her starring role in Like Crazy and developing screen partnership with director Drake Doremus
that as well as taping the two audition scenes requested by director Drake Doremus, she also submitted her take on the film’s closing moment, a poignant shower scene devoid of dialogue. Within days, Jones was on a plane to the US to start rehearsals.
She admits the intense, improvised approach employed on set was draining at times.
“There wasn’t really off-camera and on-camera. Whenever we were off-camera, Drake would still be filming and very much for that month we were Drake’s pets, we were in the characters and in that mode of being,” she recalls.
“But when you get a scene and you do it and you’ve hopefully been truthful, it gives you an energy. And it’s exciting working with people like Drake and Anton.”
Jones was only 11 when she won her first big role, playing school bully Ethel Hallow in the children’s TV show The Worst Witch. She went on to play Emma Grundy in Radio 4’s The Archers for 10 years before big screen roles beckoned in Ricky Gervais’s Cemetery Junction, The Tempest (alongside Helen Mirren and Russell Brand) and snowboarding romp Chalet Girl.
She grins as she recounts a recent encounter in Canada: “We were at the Toronto Film Festival, and somebody came up to me and said, ‘I loved you in The Worst Witch’ and I was like, ‘What? Really?’”
As for The Archers, she says: “When I go home, it’s always on in our house so I get to catch up with what’s happening from my mum. At the moment I’m travelling all over, I go where the work is.”
