The Oscar-winning actor on championing women’s stories, her rebellious youth and dementia in film
By James Mottram
JESSICA CHASTAIN, THE Oscar-winning star who has been lighting up screens for more than a decade now, is having a moment of self-reflection. After breaking into the industry with 2011’s poetic tale The Tree of Life, opposite Brad Pitt, the flame-haired, pale-skinned star has been on a wild ride through Hollywood ever since. “I feel so grateful to be alive,” she confides. “Every day I wake up, I’m so excited about what the day is going to bring me… and I have an adventurous heart and spirit.”
“Adventurous” perfectly describes Chastain. Other words that capture her: committed. Passionate. Elegant. Astute. Talented. The 46-year-old from Sacramento has proven time and again just how adept she is at working with the brightest directors Hollywood has to offer, from Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) and Christopher Nolan (Interstellar) to Aaron Sorkin (Molly’s Game, Miss Sloane), Ridley Scott (The Martian) and Guillermo del Toro (Crimson Peak).
“I’ve always been filmmaker-driven,” she notes, settling down in her seat for a cosy chat. “When my career first started, I realised that a lot of the filmmakers that I was really responding to didn’t really make movies about women. And that was a hard pill for me to swallow. So I then shifted and started working in a different way. Now I’m happy that I can hopefully inspire people to be interested in stories about women.”
Chastain has certainly managed that, whether its her real-life medic who unearths a serial killer in The Good Nurse or the fictional wantaway wife in the searing HBO remake of TV drama Scenes From A Marriage. She can do restrained and nuanced but she can also do outlandish, like the true-life titular televangelist in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the role that won her an Oscar at the third time of asking (albeit a victory overshadowed by Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock at the awards that year).
Today, when we meet in Zurich’s five-star Baur au Lac hotel on a sunny autumn afternoon, Chastain looks every bit the industry ambassador. She’s dressed in a beige trouser suit and black T-shirt that bears the “SAG-AFTRA” legend—a reference to the actors’ unions that were striking over pay and other issues over the summer of 2023. The now-resolved strike was heading for crunch talks when we met. “I’m hopeful,” says Chastain, rightly, as it turned out. ��
