In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at The Blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.
There’s one film Felicity Jones can’t wait to see next year: Wuthering Heights. “If you are going to do a classic, then it’s [about] finding a new way in,” she says. “I like the way that Emerald Fennell did that with Brideshead Revisited with Saltburn. She takes quite a classic story and then spins it and makes it alienating a little bit.”
Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 classic is one of Jones’s favorite novels — Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is too; more on that later — and the 42-year-old actress increasingly finds herself reading to find “stories that can potentially work on screen.” The key, she says, is finding the why. “You’ve got to find the: Well, what is the reason to tell it now? What is the modernity in it that we need to do it? Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Jones built her career through such rigorous selectiveness. She broke through in the years after she graduated from the University of Oxford with an English degree, starting out in British period pieces before her performance opposite Anton Yelchin in Like Crazy won her a Gotham Film Award. Later came her performance as Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything, which earned her an Oscar nomination, and she tallied her second last year for The Brutalist. In between she portrayed trailblazing women of different stripes; Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On The Basis Of Sex and Jyn Erso in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. This winter, she’s starring opposite Michelle Pfeiffer and Chloe Grace Moretz in Prime’s new Christmas movie, Oh. What. Fun.
“I feel like it’s sort of coming at the right time,” she says of the Home Alone-style comedy, in which the family’s matriarch (Pfeiffer) is accidentally left behind on a family day out. “It was a lovely, lovely cast. We had such a great time hanging out together and we all really naturally got on with each other.”
Keep reading to discover four of Jones’s favorite books.
Jones’s first selection is A Room With A View by E. M. Forster, a book she discovered because of the 1985 film. “Usually it’s the other way around,” she says. “But I just adored that film. I watched it when I was a student and then just kept watching it over and over again. I loved that it was set in Italy. I loved the romance and the character of Lucy Honeychurch and all the surrounding characters and the general kind of lust for life that is at the center of the film.” When she read the book, she was “struck by how true the film adaptation is to the book,” she says. “It captures its essence.”
The 1985 movie, in which a young Helena Bonham Carter plays the role of Honeychurch, did more than shape her reading list. “One of the reasons I wanted to become an actor was watching [Bonham Carter’s] work and the variety that then she went on to do,” says Jones. “I’ve just loved her as an actress from a really young woman.”
Her second selection is a classic for many an English Literature graduate: The Waves by Virginia Woolf. “She captures all the idiosyncrasy of thought,” she says. “She actually talked about this idea of happiness, of moments in your life when things come together and everything feels OK, but actually they are just momentary and it’s not one continuous arc of pure joy.”
Jones studied Woolf at Oxford and even wrote one of her dissertations on the author (the other was on Ibsen). “I loved just delving into all of her work, and it was the first time I’d read the stream of consciousness and this idea of just being in people’s minds and somehow I found it very comforting,” she says. “It’s funny that there’s kind of a way you have to be as a reader. You sort of have to relinquish control.”
Her third pick, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, nearly didn’t make the list. “I really like the Brontë Sisters and I was actually torn between Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre,” she says. “There’s always a brutality to their writing. There’s an emotional intensity. It’s so impassioned, and there’s a real toughness to it.”
She continues: “Growing up in the moors with that intense family and then the environment they were in, it’s just so unforgiving,” she says. “They managed to distill all of that into their work, particularly in Wuthering Heights. I just was really quite captivated by the book from quite a young age for that reason.”
Jones read her final selection, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, while on a Russian literature tear after she graduated university. “I think it probably took me about two years or something to read, and I would read other stuff in between and then come back,” she says. “I love the winterness of it, the snow and the cold, the scale. To be able to talk about the country and its entirety and then to go so particular and so microscopic.”
Watch the full interview below.
