When Jessica Chastain left her theater training at Juilliard and started landing movie roles, she got a gift. None of the movies came out right away. It took a while before anyone saw her work in Al Pacino’s Wilde Salome (which finally debuts in Venice), or Terrence Malick’s mystical The Tree of Life (which Fox Searchlight premiered in Cannes before a summer opening), or John Madden’s Mossad thriller The Debt, which post-Disney Miramax finally sold to distributor Focus Features (August 31).
The delayed openings meant that Chastain remained a hot actress –and a blank slate. Nobody projected her last movie onto what they thought she could do. So she was able to be a chameleon, playing a dramatic actress, a sweetly luminous idealized 50s mother, and a tough-as-nails assassin. She also earned raves as brassy southern blonde Celia in summer lit hit The Help, and starred opposite Michael Shannon as his wife in the ominously atmospheric drama Take Shelter, which played Sundance and Cannes, and will show on the fest circuit before Sony Pictures Classics opens it September 30. Ralph Fiennes also cast her as his wife in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, where she stood her ground against both him and the magnificent Vanessa Redgrave as her mother-in-law. Weinstein Co. picked up the film after it earned raves in Berlin; it will play Toronto before its December release. And Chastain also landed a spot in another fall fest film, Texas Killing Fields, as well as TWC’s upcoming period gangster ensemble Wettest County. We talk about all these films below.
Chastain plays the younger Helen Mirren in The Debt, which involved the two figuring out how to play each other. They quickly agreed that there’s a big difference between who you are as a younger and older woman. Her young Mossad agent takes on a pivotal mission to track down a Nazi war criminal in 1966 with fellow agents Sam Worthington and Marton Csokas. “I always try to think, how can I relate to this character?” she says.
All her directors were very different. But one stands out above the rest. “Terrence Malick is one of the greatest filmmaker of all time,” she says simply. “There’s no ego, no separation. There’s no other filmmaker who works like that.”
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