Marianne Jean-Baptiste says all the things you can't in 'Hard Truths.' She loves it.

NEW YORK – In “Hard Truths,” Marianne Jean-Baptiste gives the best performance you may not have seen yet.

Directed by Mike Leigh, the searingly funny drama has flown somewhat under the radar this Oscar season: The film was released in theaters only this past weekend, and it was passed over by the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards. But Jean-Baptiste, 57, has stealthily been one of the year’s winningest actors, the first Black woman to earn the rare trifecta of best actress prizes from the New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association and National Society of Film Critics.

“For me, it means a lot,” says the acting veteran, sipping green tea on a recent afternoon. “I’ve been working at this a long time and I take my work very seriously. I’ll say no to a job rather than think, ‘Oh, I’ll just take the money and phone it in.’ That’s not me.”

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Marianne Jean-Baptiste was 'yearning' to reteam with Mike Leigh for Hard Truths'

“Hard Truths” reunites Jean-Baptiste with Leigh, 81, after 1996’s “Secrets & Lies,” which picked up five Oscar nominations, including best supporting actress for her perceptive turn as a young woman searching for her birth mother.

In the new movie, she plays an acid-tongued misanthrope named Pansy who ceaselessly berates her taciturn husband (David Webber) and grown son (Tuwaine Barrett). We slowly learn that Pansy harbors deep resentment toward her late mother and kindly sister (Michele Austin) and lashes out at others to mask her own grief and loneliness.

As with all of Leigh’s films, the script was written only after the cast had been assembled. Each character was built from the ground up through conversations with the actors, who mapped out extensive backstories and improvised much of the dialogue.

“I got an email from Mike saying: ‘I’m doing a film and I want you to be in it. I don’t know what you’ll be doing in it, but we’ll have fun,’ ” Jean-Baptiste says. “I’d been yearning for that sort of experience again: the agency to create a character with somebody. It’s very collaborative and communal.”

The actress based Pansy off four or five women she knows, although “it’s so distilled that none of them would recognize themselves at all,” she says. “You take a bit of hypochondria from one, complaining from another, and you make a lovely cake of it that ends up with Pansy.”

There was a liberating aspect of inhabiting the character, who spews venom at everyone she encounters, from impersonal doctors to chipper salesclerks. Although Pansy’s witty diatribes are often excessively cruel, she also voices the things that many of us are already thinking.

“I wouldn’t say it, but Pansy would,” Jean-Baptiste says wryly. “We all see a baby and say the baby’s cute. It’s criminal to say a baby’s ugly, yet there are ugly babies!”

Jokes aside, Pansy has made Jean-Baptiste more "compassionate" toward strangers. After all, you never know what sort of pain others are carrying.

“I do feel so much for her,” Jean-Baptiste says. “Even now, when people are screaming or giving you the finger in their car, I’m like: ‘Bloody hell! What’s wrong with him?’ But I don’t take things too personally; I have a sense of humor about it. If you can’t lead with kindness, at least just laugh it off.”

The actress had a 'really tough' road after first Oscar nomination

The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, Jean-Baptiste grew up in South East London with dreams of becoming a barrister (“I just really wanted to do a closing argument,” she quips). She discovered acting in a children’s nativity play and continued it as a hobby throughout school, eventually enrolling at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Three years after graduation, she was cast in Leigh’s 1993 stage play “It’s a Great Big Shame.” Even then, “it was very obvious that Marianne was a versatile character actor with a great sense of humor,” Leigh says. “She’s a great nurturer of people: very unselfish and very funny.”

Shortly after, she had her big-screen breakout in “Secrets & Lies.” She remembers rubbing shoulders with Lauren Bacall and Muhammad Ali at the 1997 Oscars, where the movie was up for best picture. “It was surreal,” Jean-Baptiste says. “It’s become a lot more cynical, the whole Oscar campaign thing. Back then, we were just happy to be there and talk about the film.”

But the years to follow were “really tough,” she acknowledges. Despite her Oscar nod, she struggled to land leading roles or find projects of Leigh’s caliber: “One would expect it to at least go laterally.” Instead, “it was like, ‘We’re going to forget you did that, and you must start all over again.’ I had to really focus in on what I want and what I like.”

Jean-Baptiste gradually started to get more offers in the U.S. and relocated to Los Angeles in 2002 with her husband, former ballet dancer Evan Williams, and their two daughters. She was a series regular for seven seasons of CBS’ police procedural “Without a Trace.” Initially, “it’s daunting to have to play a person for that many years,” she says. “But then you go, ‘How do I make that interesting?’ You find new ways to challenge yourself.”

The genial actress has worked primarily in TV for the past two decades, appearing in dramas such as NBC’s “Blindspot” and Prime Video’s “Homecoming.” A self-described homebody, she’s fiercely dedicated to her hobbies: While the COVID-19 pandemic put a halt to her weekly piano lessons, she continues to cook, paint and garden.

“I’m greedy,” Jean-Baptiste says with a smile. “I’m very hungry and want to be great. I just love creating things. Whatever form it is, I just can’t get enough of it.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Marianne Jean-Baptiste talks inspiration for ‘Hard Truths’ movie