Jessica Chastain: Ascent of a woman

Last year, Jessica Chastain was a complete unknown. Now she’s in everything – with everyone. She tells Steve Rose about working with Pitt, Pacino, Fiennes, Redgrave … There’s nothing we like better than an overnight success story, but Jessica Chastain ‘s feels just too good to be true. A perfect storm of Chastain movies, swelled by critical adulation, is currently heading for our shores, in what looks like a co-ordinated assault on the awards season. Earlier this year we had a taster, with the release of Terrence Malick’s Cannes-winning The Tree of Life , in which Chastain played Brad Pitt ‘s wife – as auspicious a debut as any actor could hope for. And this week the deluge begins. First there’s The Debt, an espionage drama starring Helen Mirren . Then Chastain teamed up with Sam Worthington in steamy murder mystery Texas Killing Fields . Plus, there’s civil rights Oscar bait The Help , already a hit in the US; the apocalyptic fable Take Shelter , another winner at Cannes; Ralph Fiennes ‘s Coriolanus , relocated to war-torn Bosnia, with Vanessa Redgrave ; The Wettest County in the World, a depression era saga scripted by Nick Cave and starring Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman ; and Wilde Salomé , the film version of Al Pacino’s theatrical crowd-pleaser. A year ago, Chastain was a complete unknown. Now she’s in danger of saturating the market. In a seedy diner somewhere in LA, there is probably a failed actor wondering who stole all her luck. And the answer could be the sunny, chatty, immaculately turned-out 30-year-old sitting in front of me. Although it’s a drizzly London morning, Chastain looks as if she’s just stepped in from a 1950s garden party: she’s wearing a sleeveless turquoise dress that sets off her red hair. Her feet

Posted by on September 27, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.