Marianne Jean-Baptiste puts everything into ‘hard truths’: “It’s amazing, it’s exciting, it’s exhilarating”

A lot of the work happens separately from Mike. So he would say, “On the first day of rehearsal, bring a list of characters.” I have over 100 people on the list. And we cut this list down until it gets smaller and smaller. I ended up with about five people. And at that point, he said, “We’re going to merge those five.”

So you do an exercise where you move around and at each point in that particular space that you’re in, that character has to be visible. It just keeps going until you actually merge the characters. Then you sit down again and create a character from first memory, down to the age they will be when you see them in the movie, with all the details that come to life. It’s almost like creating a parallel universe. So I went out and found out what school she was going to. I found the house where she grew up, calculated the distance from home to school, and figured out which bus she would take. I mean, it’s finite detail, but it’s all things that you can have organic, emotional memory and recall when you get into the improv portion of rehearsal time.

How does improv experience work?

We had three and a half months of rehearsals, so what happened was there was a lot of stuff that happened before that that you don’t see. Some improvisations take five or six hours. And for example, they’re leading up to an argument, and so you start from that point. We are establishing the family’s operating conditions. So everything that you haven’t seen up to that point, we’ve taken care of it. We studied their morning routine. We researched who washed the dishes and who didn’t; Who cleans up, who doesn’t. So when you get to that scene, all the information from those improvisations is in her hands.

Have any of the five people you based Pansy on seen this movie?

I think some of them do, but what happens is, from those five people, we create a whole new character with different aspects of those five people’s lives. And then we give them pain, heartbreak, disappointment, success. So they become a different person. I mean, I would be shocked if someone came to me and said, “You based that character on that character.”