Felicity Jones Looks Back on Oscar Season and 'True Story,' and Ahead to 'Star Wars'

Felicity Jones walks the red carpet at the AARP Magazine Awards (Getty Images)

After the briefest of breaks, Felicity Jones is going back to work.

The 31-year-old British actress was everywhere during the most recent Oscar season, as she campaigned on behalf of The Theory of Everything, the Stephen Hawking biopic that netted her a Best Actress nomination, and won her co-star Eddie Redmayne the golden statuette. And in the middle of that long publicity tour, she escaped the formal voter meet-and-greets in New York and Los Angeles for a whirlwind trip to the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where she supported the premiere of True Story alongside co-stars Jonah Hill and James Franco.

In True Story, Jones plays Jill Barker, the university researcher girlfriend (and now wife) of disgraced New York Times journalist Michael Finkel (Hill). She gets caught in the crossfire of the bizarre and potentially dangerous relationship that begins to form between Finkel and an accused murderer named Christian Longo (Franco) during a series of prison interviews. Jill is far less intrigued and empathetic to the manipulative Longo, which gives Jones an opportunity to show a fierceness we don’t often see from her.

In fact, the film ups the drama by adding one scene that didn’t happen in real life, as Jones told us: Jill never met Longo, while Jones verbally undresses Franco in one of the strongest moments of the movie.

The film hits theaters on April 17, so in addition to hitting the publicity trail for True Story, she’s prepping for another little indie movie: Star Wars: Rogue One, the spin-off film that will be directed by Looper’s Rian Johnson. Yahoo Movies spoke with Jones, who is now highly trained in the art of giving vague and cheery responses, about her recent run of great work and her upcoming trip to the galaxy far, far away.

You met Jill Finkel while preparing for the movie. She was caught in a weird romantic triangle with these two men. What’d she tell you about that experience?
I think that’s exactly the right word: Romance. They became so intoxicated with each other. At first for Jill, it was very strange, and she was very skeptical of the relationship. But in our film — which is different from how it was in her life — Jill becomes very involved and obsessed with Longo. And I think, in many ways, that Longo’s presence was a way of helping Jill and Mike solve some of the problems in their relationship. They use him as a bit of a diversion.

How did she deal with something like that? How did she cope?
I think she could see that for Mike to lose his job at The New York Times was incredibly difficult for him. And so he was hoping to find a story that would redeem him in that world. So it was conflicted, because she could also see that he was inspired by something and passionate about it. So it was complicated for her, because she has a feeling that it’s not right from the very beginning, and her intuition tells her there’s something not quite right about this situation.

This movie premiered at Sundance, which was smack in the middle of the exhausting awards season. And you guys were everywhere during that campaign. What did you do when it was all over that Monday?
Oh, I went to lie on a beach for a week. It was just lovely just not to have to think about what I was going to wear for the 500th time on a red carpet. I just had a total break and just got back to a bit of normality, seeing my friends and starting to prepare for a new film. It was an amazing, incredible experience, but it has been nice to have a little bit of downtime afterwards.

You just signed on for Star Wars: Rogue One. The audition for the movie must be super-secretive and insane.
It’s hard to talk about any part of it… I mean, it’s something that I’m just really excited about and a lot of people are excited about it. So I guess there’s a lot of anticipation and it’s maintaining that anticipation. I’m just really looking forward to it. I can’t wait to get stuck in.

Did they show you the script beforehand? Did you have to enter a secure room through a secret wormhole?

There is just a lot of protection around it, so that when people go and see it, there’s surprises in it. And I think that’s really important for cinema. You don’t want to know everything before you go, you want there to be an element of surprise.

Spoiler culture is so intense, and everyone wants to know every detail ahead of time.
I know! Have patience! I think it’s good when you don’t know what’s going to happen.

When was the first time you saw Star Wars? What movies made you want to act?
I remember I watched Star Wars when I was young — obviously, it came out well before I was born, but I remember watching it with my cousins and my brother and we were all really little. I grew up watching a real selection, my mom was really into French cinema, so we would be watching ’60s French films, but then also loved going to the multiplex, and it was the real age of the blockbusters like Turner and Hooch, and going to see The Addams Family and Ghostbusters. Those were the ones growing up.

The first movie I really saw you in was Like Crazy, and you’ve worked in a lot of movies since then. But did it feel like being in The Theory of Everything changed things for you, career-wise?
I guess it was a film that a lot of people seemed to respond to and enjoyed watching, and definitely, with the Oscars, it brings a lot of attention. But I still feel like it’s the same: You’re wanting to find good parts and finding roles that are going to interest you and you can get your teeth into, and I still feel like there’s an element of still trying to go out and hunt those things down. People think you just get sent loads of offers on wonderful scripts, but it’s not quite like that. It’s always a process of trying to find good directors and good stories to tell.