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Breaking Baz: Michele Austin On How Her 30-Year Friendship With Marianne Jean-Baptiste & Mike Leigh Injected Truth Into ‘Hard Truths’


It’s amazing watching Mike Leigh’s film 'Hard Truths,' starring the extraordinary Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin, in an American theater.

Jamie Lloyd cast her in Cyrano De Bergerac, which played in the West End and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and in his production of The Effect at the National Theatre. Leigh first cast Austin in his 1992 play It’s A Great Big Shame!, which juxtaposed characters connected to the same East London address in the late Victorian age and the early 1990s. But I think it’s like anything, you get a job and there’s a script and you turn up at eight o’clock in the morning, you’re in the makeup bus and suddenly Mike introduces you to your husband, and then you’ve got to find some sort of common ground and kind of create an intimacy.

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