Actress Felicity Jones became a mother for the first time during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. She and her director husband Charles Guard welcomed their baby son in April 2020. “To have a baby in an apocalyptic moment is pretty scary... My husband and I have been calling it double lockdown,” she told The Times.

A daughter arrived two years later, and as the 41-year-old admits, juggling a career and family life isn’t always easy. “My kids keep me very firmly indoors,” she told PEOPLE in December. “When I have the opportunity, I do like to go out, but a lot of the time, I’m in bed by 9 o’clock so I can be up at, like, 4:30 a.m. the next day”.

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Felicity Jones at the Oscars

Jones is one of the five nominees for the Best Actress in a Supporting Role at this year’s Academy Awards, which take place in Los Angeles on Sunday. She gained her nomination for her role as Erzsébet in Brady Corbe’s historical drama The Brutalist. It is her second nomination at the Oscars, after having being in the list for the Best Actress in 2015 (as Jane Wilde Hawking in The Theory of Everything).

“You don’t want to get your hopes up,” she said. “So you just try and reassure yourself. You’re like, every step of the way, ‘This is great. Where the film has got to is great.’ And everything else will be the cherry on the cake.”

Whatever the outcome on Sunday night, first and foremost are those she is closest to - her family. In an interview with The Guardian, Felicity spoke about the pressures and demands of being a mother, and compared it to her own upbringing.

“I think about bringing up our children all the time, and the thought is: we can’t mess it up, we have to do everything perfectly, otherwise they’re going to hate us for the rest of our lives,” she explained. “Safeguarding the anarchy and innocence of childhood is so hard to do now”.

Felicity Jones hankers for a life without a smartphone

Technology has shifted the way we grow up - life seemed much simpler back then, more consistent and carefree, as Jones admits. “Looking back on my own childhood, it felt limitless. Summer holidays away from school felt like they went on forever. Anything before the smartphone was a utopia because we weren’t recording every minute of our experiences".

There is one phobia that Jones finds difficult to shake off - an aversion to what she feels is like taking a step closer to narcissism. “I try not to look in the mirror too much,“ she says. ”Madness lies that way – looking in the mirror is not where the truth is. The beauty of wearing contact lenses is that I can take them out at the end of the day and the world becomes beautifully blurred. It makes more sense like that than it does in sharp vision".

The 97th Academy Awards take place at Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday 2 March 2025 starting at 7 p.m. EDT / 4 p.m. PDT. The ceremony will be aired lived by ABC, with updates on Oscar.com, Oscars.org, the Academy’s Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook pages.

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