Jessica Chastain
Jessica Michelle Chastain is an American actress and producer. Known for primarily starring in projects with feminist themes, she has received various accolades, including an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, in addition to nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award, two Tony Awards and two British Academy Film Awards. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2012.
Chastain developed an interest in acting from an early age and made her professional stage debut in 1998 as Shakespeare's Juliet. After studying acting at the Juilliard School, she worked on television and stage. After making her film debut at age 31 in the drama Jolene, Chastain had her breakthrough in 2011 with six film releases, including the dramas Take Shelter and The Tree of Life. She received Academy Award nominations for playing an aspiring socialite in the period drama The Help and a CIA analyst in the thriller Zero Dark Thirty.
Greater commercial success came with the science fiction films Interstellar and The Martian, and the horror film It Chapter Two. Chastain received further acclaim for playing strong-willed women in the dramas A Most Violent Year, Miss Sloane, and Molly's Game, and the television miniseries Scenes from a Marriage. She went on to portray Tammy Faye Bakker in the biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress, and Tammy Wynette in the miniseries George & Tammy.
On Broadway, Chastain has starred in revivals of The Heiress and A Doll's House. The latter earned her a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She is the founder of the production company Freckle Films, which was created to promote diversity in film, and is an investor in the soccer club Angel City FC. Chastain is vocal about mental health issues, as well as gender and racial equality. She is married to fashion executive Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo, and they have two children.
Early life and education
Jessica Michelle Chastain was born on March 24, 1977, in Sacramento, California, to Jerri Renee Hastey and rock musician Michael Monasterio. Her parents were both teenagers when she was born. Chastain is reluctant to publicly discuss her family background. She was estranged from Monasterio, who died in 2013, and has stated that no father is listed on her birth certificate. Chastain has two sisters and two brothers. Her younger sister, Juliet, died by suicide in 2003 following years of drug addiction. Chastain was raised in Sacramento by her mother and stepfather, Michael Hastey, a firefighter. Her family struggled financially. Chastain has said that her stepfather was the first person to make her feel secure. She shares a close bond with her maternal grandmother, Marilyn, and credits her as someone who "always believed in me".Chastain developed an interest in acting at age seven, after her grandmother took her to a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. She would regularly put on amateur shows with other children, and considered herself to be their artistic director. As a student at El Camino Fundamental High School in Sacramento, Chastain struggled academically. She was a loner and considered herself a misfit in school, eventually finding an outlet in the performing arts. She has described how she used to miss school to read Shakespeare, whose plays she became enamored with after attending the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with her classmates. With too many absences during her senior year in school, Chastain did not qualify for graduation, but later obtained an adult diploma. She later attended Sacramento City College from 1996 to 1997, during which she was a member of the institution's debate team. Describing her early childhood, she recalled:
In 1998, Chastain finished her education at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and made her professional stage debut as Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet staged by TheatreWorks, a company in the San Francisco Bay Area. The production led her to audition for the Juilliard School in New York City, where she was soon accepted and granted a scholarship funded by actor Robin Williams. In her first year at the school, Chastain suffered from anxiety and was worried about being dropped from the program, spending most of her time reading and watching films. She later remarked that her participation in a successful production of The Seagull during her second year helped build her confidence. She graduated from the school with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2003. In 2025, Chastain announced she was enrolled in a "mid-career" Master of Public Administration program at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Career
2004–2010: Early work
Shortly before graduating from Juilliard, Chastain attended an event for final-year students in Los Angeles, where she was signed to a talent holding deal by the television producer John Wells. She relocated to Los Angeles and started auditioning for jobs. She initially found the process difficult, which she believed was due to other people finding her difficult to categorize as a redhead with an unconventional look. In her television debut, The WB network's 2004 pilot remake of the 1960s gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, she was cast as Carolyn Stoddard. The pilot was directed by P. J. Hogan, but the series was never picked up for broadcast. Later that year, she appeared as a guest performer on the medical drama series ER playing a woman she described as "psychotic", which led to her getting more unusual parts such as accident victims or characters with mental illness. She went on to appear in such roles in a few other television series from 2004 to 2007, including Veronica Mars, Close to Home, Blackbeard, and Law & Order: Trial by Jury.In 2004, Chastain took on the role of Anya, a virtuous young woman, in a Williamstown Theatre Festival production of Anton Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard in Massachusetts, starring with Michelle Williams. Also that year, she worked with Playwrights Horizons on a production of Richard Nelson's Rodney's Wife as the daughter of a troubled middle-aged film actor. Her performance was not well received by the critic Ben Brantley of The New York Times, who thought that she "somehow seems to keep losing color as the evening progresses". While working on the play, she was recommended by Nelson to Al Pacino, who was looking for an actress to star in his production of Oscar Wilde's tragedy Salome. The play tells the tragic story of its titular character's sexual exploration. In the play, Salome is a 16-year-old, but Chastain, aged 29 then, was cast for the part. The play was staged in 2006 at the Wadsworth Theatre in Los Angeles, and Chastain later remarked that it helped bring her to the attention of several casting directors. Writing for Variety, the critic Steven Oxman criticized her portrayal in the play: "Chastain is so ill-at-ease with Salome, not quite certain whether she's a capable seductress or a whiny, wealthy brat; she doesn't flesh out either choice".
Chastain made her film debut in 2008 as the titular character in Dan Ireland's drama Jolene, based on a short story by E. L. Doctorow inspired by Dolly Parton's song "Jolene". It follows the life of a sexually abused teenager over the course of a decade. Chastain's performance was praised by a reviewer for the New York Observer, who considered her as the only notable aspect of the production. She won a Best Actress award at the Seattle International Film Festival. In 2009, she had a minor role in Stolen, a mystery-thriller film with a limited theatrical release. Also in 2009, she played the part of Desdemona in The Public Theatre production of Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, co-starring John Ortiz as the title character and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago. Writing for The New Yorker, Hilton Als commended Chastain for finding "a beautiful maternal depth" in her role.
In 2010, Chastain starred in John Madden's dramatic thriller The Debt, portraying a young Mossad agent sent to East Berlin in the 1960s to capture a former Nazi doctor who carried out medical experiments in concentration camps. She shared her role with Helen Mirren, with the two actresses portraying the character at different phases of her life. They worked together before filming to perfect the voice and mannerisms of the character and make them consistent. Chastain took classes in German and Krav Maga, and studied books about the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and Mossad history. William Thomas of Empire termed the film a "smart, tense, well-acted thriller", and noted that Chastain "pulses with strength and vulnerability" in her part. She also appeared as Mary Debenham in an episode of the British television series Agatha Christie's Poirot, based on Agatha Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express.
2011–2013: Breakthrough and rise to prominence
After struggling for a breakthrough in film, Chastain had six releases in 2011 and received wide recognition for several of them. The first of the roles was as the wife of Michael Shannon's character in Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter, a drama about a troubled father who tries to protect his family from what he believes is an impending storm. The film was screened at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and critic Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph noted how much Chastain's supporting part aided the narrative. In Coriolanus, an adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy from actor-director Ralph Fiennes, she played Virgilia. Her next role was opposite Brad Pitt, as the loving mother of three children in Terrence Malick's experimental drama The Tree of Life, which she had filmed in 2008. Chastain signed on to the film without receiving a traditional screenplay from Malick, and she improvised several scenes and dialogues with Pitt. She considered her part to be "the embodiment of grace and the spirit world"; in preparation, she practiced meditation, studied paintings of the Madonna, and read poems by Thomas Aquinas. The film premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival to a polarized reception from the audience, though it was praised by critics and won the Palme d'Or. The critic Justin Chang termed the film a "hymn to the glory of creation, an exploratory, often mystifying poem" and credited Chastain for playing her part with "heartrending vulnerability".Chastain's biggest success of the year came with the drama The Help, co-starring Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Emma Stone, which was based on Kathryn Stockett's novel of the same name. She played Celia Foote, an aspiring socialite in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, who develops a friendship with her Black maid. Chastain was drawn to Foote's antiracist stand, and connected with her energy and enthusiasm; in preparation, she watched the films of Marilyn Monroe and researched the history of Tunica, Mississippi, where her character was raised. The Help grossed $216 million at the box office to become her most widely seen film to that point. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times praised the chemistry between Chastain and Spencer, and Roger Ebert credited her for being "unaffected and infectious". The ensemble of The Help won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Cast, and Chastain received Academy, BAFTA, Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress, all of which she lost to Spencer.
Chastain's final two roles of the year were in Wilde Salomé, a documentary based on her 2006 production of Salome, and the critically panned crime-thriller Texas Killing Fields. Her film roles in 2011, particularly in The Help, Take Shelter and The Tree of Life, won her awards from several critics' organizations. Two of Chastain's films in 2012 premiered at the 65th Cannes Film Festival — the animated comedy Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted and the crime drama Lawless. In the former, which marked the third installment in the Madagascar series, she voiced Gia the Jaguar with an Italian accent. With global revenues of $747 million, the film ranks as her highest-grossing release. In Lawless, based on Matt Bondurant's Prohibition-era novel The Wettest County in the World, she played a dancer who becomes embroiled in a conflict between three bootlegging brothers. The film received generally positive reviews, with Richard Corliss finding Chastain to be filled with "poised, seductive gravity". In an experimental biopic of the author C. K. Williams, entitled The Color of Time, directed by the New York University students of actor James Franco, she played the mother of the young Williams.
File:Jessica Chastain Cannes 2, 2012.jpg|thumb|left|upright|alt=Jessica Chastain smiles while she gently looks away from the camera|Chastain at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival where two of her films — Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted and Lawless — were screened
A short part Chastain had filmed for Terrence Malick's To the Wonder was edited out of the final film, and due to scheduling conflicts, she dropped out of the action films Oblivion and Iron Man 3. She instead made her Broadway debut in a revival of the 1947 play The Heiress, playing the role of Catherine Sloper, a naïve young girl who transforms into a powerful woman. Chastain was reluctant to take the role, fearing the anxiety she had faced during her early stage performances. She ultimately agreed after finding a connection to Sloper, explaining: "she's painfully uncomfortable and I used to be that". The production was staged at the Walter Kerr Theatre from November 2012 to February 2013. Ben Brantley of The New York Times was disappointed in Chastain's performance, writing that she was "oversignaling the thoughts within" and that her delivery of dialogue was sometimes flat. The Heiress emerged as a sleeper hit at the box office.
Kathryn Bigelow's thriller Zero Dark Thirty was Chastain's final film release of 2012. It is a partly fictionalized account of the nearly decade-long manhunt for Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks in 2001. She played Maya Harris, a CIA intelligence analyst who helps kill bin Laden. Chastain was unable to meet the intelligence analyst on whom her character was based, so she relied on the research done by the film's screenwriter Mark Boal. The difficult subject matter made it unpleasant for her to film; she suffered from depression during production, and once walked off the set in tears because she was unable to continue. Zero Dark Thirty was critically acclaimed, albeit controversial for its scenes of torture that were shown providing useful intelligence in the search for bin Laden. Roger Ebert took note of Chastain's versatility, and likened her ability and range to that of Meryl Streep. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote, "Chastain is a marvel. She plays Maya like a gathering storm in an indelible, implosive performance that cuts so deep we can feel her nerve endings." She won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama and received Academy, BAFTA and SAG nominations for Best Actress.
Chastain took on the lead role of a musician who is forced to care for her boyfriend's troubled nieces in the horror film Mama, directed by Andy Muschietti. She was drawn to the idea of playing a woman drastically different from the "perfect mother" roles she had previously played, and she based her character's look on the singer Alice Glass. The critic Richard Roeper considered her performance to be proof of her being one of the finest actors of her generation. During the film's opening weekend in North America, Chastain became the first performer in fifteen years to have leading roles in the top two films at the box office. She then starred as the titular character of a depressed woman who separates from her husband following a tragic incident in the drama The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, which she also produced. The writer-director Ned Benson initially wrote the story from the perspective of Rigby's husband, then wrote a separate version from Rigby's perspective at the insistence of Chastain. Three versions of the film — Him, Her, and Them — were released. It did not find a wide audience, but the critic A. O. Scott praised Chastain for "short-circuit conventional distinctions between tough and vulnerable, showing exquisite control even when her character is losing it, and keeping her balance even when the movie pitches and rolls toward melodrama".