In a room inside Forte di Belvedere, Florence’s late-16th century fortress, Felicity Jones awaits. The British actress is here for the worldwide launch of Inferno, the third movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s series of Robert Langdon books.
It will feel familiar to those who’ve seen The Da Vinci Code or Angels & Demons: Tom Hanks as Langdon, Ron Howard directing, conspiracies and world-saving. But what makes it stand out are the Florentine locations, as symbologist Langdon and Jones’s Dr Sienna Brooks bustle around the city, following clues that point to a virus designed to quell overpopulation. Shooting here was a blessing for Jones, who has “loved” Merchant Ivory’s A Room With a View since childhood. “That scene of Helena Bonham Carter sitting in the window looking over the Duomo stayed with me.”
It’s easy to imagine the 32-year-old appearing in similar corset dramas and literary adaptations. But she’s avoided that trap of typecasting, with her best work – love story Like Crazy, her Oscar-nominated turn as Stephen Hawking’s wife Jane in The Theory of Everything – being much more contemporary.
This year promises to be her biggest yet: after Inferno comes Star Wars spin-off Rogue One, in which she plays the lead, and then a potent role as a dying mother in A Monster Calls, an adaptation of Patrick Ness’s award-winning children’s fantasy novel.
Yet Jones is reluctant to define 2016 in such terms. “It’s definitely a busy year,” she deflects. “You never know when films are going to come out. I made A Monster Calls two years ago and it took this long to come out [because of the complex visual effects]. So it’s rather by coincidence that they’re happening at the same time. But I’m getting to play some really cool women.”
Certainly Jones makes more of an impression than Audrey Tautou and Ayelet Zurer, Hanks’s previous co-stars in the series, as an emergency-room medic who helps Langdon when he’s brought in with amnesia and a bullet graze to the head. “I just loved that she has this very fast mind and sometimes says things that are a little disagreeable,” says Jones.
In preparation for the role, she spent time in emergency rooms in New York, speaking to doctors. “They’re often adrenaline junkies. They have to think very quickly. Often they’re people who like extreme sports. I thought I could put that into Sienna’s back-story, that she’s someone who’s not afraid of challenges or pushing herself.’”
Raised in Birmingham – her father was a journalist (and later business consultant), her mother worked in advertising – Jones boasts a similar can-do attitude.
She began acting at the age of 11 at an after-school workshop, appearing in her first TV feature, The Treasure Seekers, two years later. But the classroom was just as important to her. “I desperately wanted to be independent when I was older,” she remembers. “You realise you’ve got to work hard at school to achieve that.”
By the time she went to Oxford to read English, she was already several years into a decade-long stint on Radio 4’s The Archers, playing Emma Carter. On graduating in 2006, the roles came quickly – from the big-screen version of Brideshead Revisited (2008) to the Ricky Gervais-Stephen Merchant comedy Cemetery Junction (2010). Still, it was tear-stained transatlantic love story Like Crazy (2011) that truly announced her, winning Jones a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
When last we met, Jones had spent an exhausting six months auditioning and reading for Warren Beatty for the actor-director’s long-gestating project about billionaire recluse Howard Hughes. Intimidating? “I’m not intimidated,” she told me. “I remember my mother once saying to me: ‘If you feel something very strongly and passionately, no matter what the consequences, always express it.’ And I have lived by that. It can be frightening but you have to be brave and realise, ‘I’ll still be OK if I don’t have any of this’.”
Though she won the part, Jones had to drop out due to repeated delays. She took on James Marsh’s Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything (2014) instead; proving more than a match for Eddie Redmayne as the physicist, Jones claimed Best Actress nominations at the Oscars, Golden Globes and Baftas.
While she’d briefly introduced herself to Hollywood in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I wonder whether Theory changed things for her. “I feel as though your appetite changes – I was keen to do something that felt very modern,” she says, steering the conversation back to Inferno. “I loved the way Ron wanted to shoot the film, using a lot of handheld camera to create a sense of immediacy.”
That’s not quite what I meant. Did making Marsh’s film change the type of scripts she was sent? “I try to read everything that’s out there,” she answers diplomatically. “You can get pigeonholed. Often you have to convince the director.”
It’s a tactic that helped her win the Rogue One role. Set between Episode III and Episode IV – the latter being the very first Star Wars movie – this spin-off sees her play Jyn Erso, a former criminal recruited by the Rebel Alliance to steal plans to the Empire’s Death Star. “It was extraordinary,” she says. “I got to work with monkeys with blasters and strange creatures with tentacles.”
The actress is under no illusions about what entering the George Lucas universe means. “People have such affection for Star Wars. Whether they’re seven or 70, people have been touched by it. They do want to meet you and say ‘Hi,’ but that’s part of it.” And the avalanche of merchandise? “It’s interesting seeing dolls – or ‘action figures’, as I should call them – of yourself. Especially when your nephew is chewing your head off!”
Yet it’s the film due after Rogue One that may yet live longest in the memory – A Monster Calls, the story of a boy, his terminally ill mother and the tree monster that comes to him in his dreams. “I thought it was a really clever way of telling a story about grief and loss,” says Jones, smiling when she hears audiences have been sobbing after screenings. “It’s good, it’s cathartic,” she says. “You’ve got to get it out.”
‘Inferno’ (12A) opens today. ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars’ is released on 16 December. ‘A Monster Calls’ opens on 1 January
