Jessica Chastain

At 47 years old, Jessica Chastain has this physical status:

Jessica Michelle Chastain (born March 24, 1977) is an American actress and producer.

She is known for her portrayals of strong-willed women in films with feminist themes.

Chastain's accolades include a Golden Globe Award and two Academy Award nominations.

Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2012. Born and raised in Sacramento, California, Chastain developed an interest in acting from a young age.

In 1998, she made her professional stage debut as Shakespeare's Juliet.

After studying acting at the Juilliard School, she was signed to a talent holding deal with the television producer John Wells.

She was a recurring guest star in several television series, including Law & Order: Trial by Jury.

She also took on roles in the stage productions of Anton Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard in 2004 and Oscar Wilde's tragedy Salome in 2006. Chastain made her film debut in the drama Jolene (2008), and gained wide recognition in 2011 for starring roles in half a dozen films, including the dramas Take Shelter and The Tree of Life.

Her performance as an aspiring socialite in The Help earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

In 2012, she won a Golden Globe Award and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing a CIA analyst in the thriller Zero Dark Thirty.

Chastain made her Broadway debut in a revival of The Heiress in the same year.

Her highest-grossing releases came with the science fiction films Interstellar (2014) and The Martian (2015), and the horror film It Chapter Two (2019), and she continued to receive critical acclaim for her performances in the dramas A Most Violent Year (2014), Miss Sloane (2016), and Molly's Game (2017). Chastain is the founder of the production company Freckle Films, which was created to promote diversity in film.

She is vocal about mental health issues, as well as gender and racial equality.

She is married to fashion executive Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo, with whom she has a daughter.

Early life and education

Jessica Michelle Chastain was born on March 24, 1977, in Sacramento, California, to Jerri Renee Hastey (née Chastain) 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. She 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. She says her stepfather was the first person to make her feel secure. She shares a close bond with her maternal grandmother, Marilyn, whom she credits 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 the 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.

Personal life

Despite significant media attention, Chastain remains guarded about her personal life, and chooses not to attend red carpet events with a partner. She considers herself to be a "shy" person, and in 2011 said that she enjoys domestic routines like dog-walking and playing ukulele, rather than partying. She has cited the actress Isabelle Huppert as an influence, for managing a family, while also playing "out-there roles" on screen.

Chastain is an animal lover, and has adopted a rescue dog. She was a pescatarian for much of her life; following health troubles she began practicing veganism. She is an investor for Beyond Meat, a meat substitutes company.

In the 2000s, Chastain was in a long-term relationship with writer-director Ned Benson that ended in 2010. In 2012, she began dating Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo, an Italian count of the Passi de Preposulo noble family, who is an executive for the fashion brand Moncler. On June 10, 2017, she married Preposulo at his family's estate in Carbonera, Italy. In 2018, the couple had a daughter through surrogacy. They later had a second daughter. They reside in New York City.

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Career

Chastain appeared at an event for final-year students in Los Angeles, where she was signed to a talent holding contract by television producer John Wells shortly before graduating from Juilliard. She moved to Los Angeles and started applying for jobs. She found the process initially difficult, owing to other people's inability to distinguish her as a redhead with an unusual appearance. Carolyn Stoddard was the star of the WB network's 2004 pilot revival of the 1960s gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. P. J. Hogan's pilot was produced, but the series was never picked up for broadcast. Later this year, she appeared on the medical drama series ER as a woman she described as "psychotic," which led to her playing more complicated characters such as accident victims or characters with mental disorders. She continued to appear in such television series from 2004 to 2007, including Veronica Mars (2004), Close to Home (2006), Blackbeard (2006), and Law & Order: Jury (2005–06).

In a Williamstown Theatre Festival production of Anton Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard in Massachusetts starring Michelle Williams, Chastain played Anya, a virtuous young woman. She appeared on Playwrights Horizons on a film of Richard Nelson's Wife as the daughter of a struggling middle-aged film actress. As the evening progresses, Ben Brantley, a New York Times writer, said that she "somehow seems to keep losing color as the evening progresses." Nelson suggested Al Pacino, who was looking for an actress to appear in Oscar Wilde's tragedy Salome while filming. The play tells the tragic tale of its titular character's sexual journey. Salome is a 16-year-old actor in the drama, but Chastain, 29, who was 29 years old at the time, was cast for the role. In 2006 at the Wadsworth Theatre in Los Angeles, Chastain later remarked that it helped bring her to the attention of several casting directors. Steven Oxman, a writer for Variety, sluggishly wrote about her role in the play: "Chastain is so ill-at-ease with Salome that she is unsure whether she is a competent seductress or a snoolish brat; she doesn't know if she is a good seductress or a whiny, wealthy brat; she does not flesh out either option."

Chastain made her film debut in 2008 as the titular character in Dan Ireland's drama Jolene, which was based on a short story by E. L. Doctorow influenced by Dolly Parton's song "Jolene." It follows a decaden boy who was sexually assaulted adolescent. A writer for the New York Observer praised Chastain's appearance, describing her as the only notable feature of the production. At the Seattle International Film Festival, she was named Best Actress. She appeared in Stolen (2009), a limited theatrical release of a mystery-thriller film. In 2009, she appeared in Desdemona in Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, co-starring John Ortiz as the title character and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago. Hilton Als written for The New Yorker, and she lauded Chastain for her "most feminine depth" in her role.

Chastain appeared 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 conducted medical experiments in concentration camps. She discussed her relationship with Helen Mirren, with the two actresses portraying the character at various stages of her life. They worked together before filming to finen the voice and demeanor of the character and keep them consistent. Chastain took courses in German and Krav Maga, as well as reading books about Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and Mossad history. William Thomas of Empire called the film a "smart, dramatic, well-acted drama," and Chastain's role "pulses with emotion and vulnerability." In an episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot, based on Agatha Christie's 1934 book Murder on the Orient Express, she appeared as Mary Debenham.

Chastain had six debuts in 2011 and gained significant attention for several of them after struggling for a breakthrough in film. In Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter, a drama about a struggling father who is trying to shield his family from what he sees as an imminent storm. The film was screening at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and reporter Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph noted how much Chastain's supporting role contributed to the plot. She appeared in Coriolanus, an interpretation of actor-director Ralph Fiennes' Shakespearian tragedy, she played Virgilia. In Terrence Malick's experimental drama The Tree of Life, she had earlier filmed in 2008. Chastain was unable to get a typical screenplay from Malick, and she improvised several scenes and dialogues with Pitt. She considered her role as "the embodiment of grace and the spirit world" during preparations; she meditated, researched paintings of the Madonna, and read Thomas Aquinas' poems. The film premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival to a polarized audience, but critics praised it and claimed the Palme d'Or. "Hymn to the glory of creation, an exploratory, often perplexing [...] poem," the critic said of Chastain for her role in "heartrending vulnerability."

Chastain's best show of the year came with the comedy The Help, starring Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, and Emma Stone, which was based on Kathryn Stockett's book of the same name. In 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, she played Celia Foote, an aspiring socialite who forms a bond with her Black maid (played by Spencer). Chastain was attracted by Foote's anti-racist demonstrations and bonded with her energy and enthusiasm; in preparation, she watched Marilyn Monroe's films and researched the roots of Tunica, Mississippi, where her character was born. The Help to become the most well-known film to that point. Chastain and Spencer's chemistry were lauded by Manohla Dargis of The New York Times, and Roger Ebert praised her for being "unaffected and infectious." The ensemble of The Help received the Screen Actor Guild Award for Outstanding Cast, and Chastain received Academy, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and SAG Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress, all of whom she lost to Spencer.

Chastain's final two performances of the year were in Wilde Salomé, a documentary based on her 2006 debut of Salome, and Texas Killing Fields, a critically panned crime-thriller. Multiple critics' organizations honored her film work in 2011, including The Help, Take Shelter, and The Tree of Life. The animated comedy Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted and the crime drama Lawless were two of Chastain's films at the 65th Cannes Film Festival in 2012, opening at the Cannes Film Festival. Gia the Jaguar was portrayed with an Italian accent in the former, which was the third installment of the Madagascar series. The film debuts as the nation's highest-grossing film with global sales of $747 million. She played a dancer in Lawless, based on Matt Bondurant's Prohibition-era book The Wettest County in the World, as a result of a dispute between three bootlegging brothers (played by Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, and Jason Clarke). The film received largely critical feedback, with Richard Corliss finding Chastain to be full of "poised, seductive gravity." She played the mother of the young Williams in an experimental biopic of author C. K. Williams, titled The Color of Time (2012), directed by actor James Franco of New York University.

Chastain had filmed for Terrence Malick's To the Wonder (2012) but she was pushed out of the final film, and due to scheduling conflicts, she had to cancel out of the action films Oblivion and Iron Man 3 (both 2013). Catherine Sloper, a nave teenage girl who transforms into a strong woman, made her Broadway debut in a revival of the 1947 play The Heiress. Chastain was hesitant to play the part due to the fear she had experienced during her early stage performances. After finding a link to Sloper, she finally agreed, saying: "She's painfully ill and I used to be that." From November 2012 to February 2013, the performance was staged at the Walter Kerr Theatre. In Chastain's performance, Ben Brantley of The New York Times was dissatisfied, writing that she was "oversigning the thoughts within" and that her dialogue was often stale and that her message was irregular. The Heiress arrived at the box office as a sleeper.

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's thriller, was Chastain's last film release of 2012. It is a partially fictionalized account of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's nearly decade-long hunt after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Maya Harris, a CIA intelligence analyst who aids in the assassination of bin Laden, played Maya Harris, a fictional intelligence analyst who assists in the assassination of bin Laden. Chastain was unable to meet the undercover agent on whom her character was based, so she rely on the film's screenwriter Mark Boal's research. The difficult subject matter made it difficult for her to film; she suffered from depression during filming; and once she was unable to continue walking off the set in tears. Zero Dark Thirty was widely praised, but it was also notorious for the scenes of torture that were shown to provide useful intelligence in the hunt for bin Laden. Roger Ebert praised Chastain's versatility and likened her ability and range to Meryl Sterep's. "Chastain is a marvel," Rolling Stone's Peter Travers wrote. In an unforgettable, implosive performance in which we can feel her nerve endings, she plays Maya like a gathered storm." She was named in the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama, as well as Academy, BAFTA, and SAG nominations for Best Actress.

In the horror film Mama (2013), directed by Andy Muschietti, Chastain played a singer who is compelled to care for her boyfriend's troubled nieces. She was attracted to the prospect of playing a woman in a "perfect mother" role she had previously played, and she based her character's look on Alice Glass. Richard Roeper said her appearance was evidence that she is one of the best actresses of her generation. Chastain was the first performer in fifteen years to have leading roles in the top two films (Mama and Zero Dark Thirty) at the box office during the film's opening weekend in North America. Following a tragic event in Eleanor Rigby's drama The Disappearance of a Woman (played by James McAvoy), she starred in the titular role of a depressed woman who separates from her husband (played by James McAvoy). Ned Benson first wrote the story from Rigby's perspective and then wrote a separate version of Rigby's viewpoint at Chastain's insistence. Three versions of the film — Him, Her, and Them — were released. It did not have a large audience, but critic A. O. Scott praised Chastain for "short-circuit[ing] traditional boundaries between tough and vulnerable, demonstrating remarkable control even as her character is losing it and retaining her equilibrium even as the film pitches and rolls toward melodrama.

In 2014, Chastain appeared in three films. Miss Julie, a film version of August Strindberg's 1888 play of the same name starring director Liv Ullmann, was played by the titular character. It tells the tragic tale of a sexually repressed Anglo-Irish aristocrat who wants to sleep with her father's valet (Colin Farrell). She was attracted to Ullmann's feminist viewpoint on the issue. The film was limited in theaters only. When filming Miss Julie in Ireland, she received the script for Christopher Nolan's science fiction film Interstellar (2014). The high-profile film, co-starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway, was shot mainly with IMAX cameras, with a budget of $165 million. Chastain played McConaughey's adult daughter; she was attracted to the project for the emotional heft she discovered in the father-daughter pair. Chastain's support role, according to Drew McWeeny of HitFix, she stood out. Interstellar's top-grossing live-action film to date, earning $701 million worldwide.

Chastain appeared in J.C. Chandor's directed crime drama A Most Violent Year in her last release of 2014. The film, set in 1981, the year in which the city had the highest crime rate, tells the tale of a heating-oil company owner (Oscar Isaac) and his ruthless wife (Chastain). She researched the period and worked with a dialect coach to learn in a Brooklyn accent. She worked with the film's costume designer to work on her character's wardrobe, and Armani sent her with period clothing. Chastain was "terrific" in a role influenced by Lady Macbeth's, according to Mark Kermode of The Observer, and Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle described her appearance as "the embodiment of a young New York woman of the time." For it, she was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. The Broadcast Film Critics Association honoured Chastain for her work in 2014 with a special achievement award.

Chastain appeared in Ridley Scott's science fiction film The Martian in 2015. Matt Damon stars in the film The film stars Matt Damon as a botanist who is trapped on Mars by a team of astronauts led by Chastain's character. Chastain spent time in Houston and talked with astronauts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Johnson Space Center, and she based her role on Tracy Caldwell Dyson, whom she spent time in Houston. In two years, the Martian was her second film to gross over $600 million in a row. In Guillermo del Toro's gothic romance Crimson Peak, Chastain appeared as a woman plotting with her brother (Tom Hiddleston) to terrorize his new bride (Mia Wasikowska). Rebecca (1940) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? She approached the villainous part with empathy and preparation. (1962). Del Toro portrayed Chastain in a role he described as "psychopathic," but Variety's Peter Debruge discovered her "alarmically miscast" and chastised her for failing to adequately communicate her character's insecurity and ruthlessness. David Sims of Slate praised her for her role's "jealous passion to the hilt."

Chastain was keen to have a light-hearted role after a string of intense roles. In The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016), which served as both a sequel and a prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, she discovered it. She was attracted to the prospect of portraying a warrior whose capabilities were equal to those of the male lead, but the film failed both critically and commercially. Chastain appeared in Miss Sloane, a political drama that reunited her with John Madden. She read the novel Capitol Punishment by disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff to investigate lobbying in America and talked to female lobbyists to discuss their demeanors and sense of style. Peter Travers praised Chastain for successfully bringing the audience into Sloane's life, while Justin Chang called her work "a tour de force of rhetorical precision and tightly coiled emotional energy." She was given a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama. Chastain also established Freckle Films in 2016, led by a team of female executives.

Chastain began in 2017 as the executive producer and narrating I Am Jane Doe, a film about sex trafficking, on television. Chastain appeared in two projects directed by women in an attempt to collaborate with more female filmmakers — Niki Caro's The Zookeeper's Wife and Susanna White's Woman Walks Ahead. In the former, an adaptation of Diane Ackerman's non-fiction book of the same name, she co-starred with Johan Heldenbergh as the true-life Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina abiski, who saved many human and animal lives during World War II. The film received mixed feedback, but Stephen Holden noted how Chastain's "watchful, layered performance" inspired the film. Catherine Weldon, a nineteenth-century feminist who served as an advisor to the Sioux chieftain Sitting Bull before the Wounded Knee Massacre, is told in Woman Walks Ahead. She was keen on playing a role that young girls could use for inspiration, as well as providing off-screen prompts to prevent a white savior story.

In Aaron Sorkin's directorial debut, Molly Bloom, a former skier who ran a high-profile gaming business that resulted in her capture by the FBI, portrayed Molly Bloom, a former skier who operated a high-profile gambling business that resulted in her detention by the FBI. She took the role due to her passion to work with Sorkin, who admired her writing. Instead of relying on Bloom's public image, she met Bloom personally to discover her personal flaws and vulnerabilities. She also investigated the world of underground poker and interviewed some of Bloom's clients. Peter Debruge praised her role as "one of the screen's best female roles," and credited both Sorkin's script and Chastain's "stratospheric talent" for the film's popularity. It was her fifth Golden Globe nomination for her fifth time. In 2018, she hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live and spoke about the virtual reality reality show Spheres: Songs of Spacetime. She had shot a scene in Xavier Dolan's ensemble drama The Death & Life of John F. Donovan, but her scenes were cut from the final cut as Dolan discovered her role was incompatible with the story.

Chastain played an evil alien in the X-Men series's twelfth installment, despite the fact that the film was based on female characters. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian regarded it as "a waste of her talent," and the film received poor box office returns. She reunited with Andy Muschietti in It Chapter Two, the sequel to Stephen King's book It Chapter Two. Beverly Marsh, a woman in an intimate marriage, appeared in the adult Beverly Marsh (a woman in an intimate relationship), associating Sophia Lillis. Chastain's filming experience was difficult, as Muschietti favored the use of practical effects over computer-generated images; one scene required her to be coated with 4,500 U. gallons (17,000 liters) of fake blood. The film received rave reviews, with Evening Standard's Charlotte O'Sullivan finding Chastain to be "suitably sad and sepulchral" in her role. It earned over $470 million worldwide.

Chastain wrote and appeared in the action film Ava (2020), which was initially planned to be directed by Matthew Newton, who has been accused of domestic violence under Freckle Films. Newton was fired with Tate Taylor after she was chastised for deciding to work with him. In an underwhelming film, Boyd van Hoeij of The Hollywood Reporter regretted Chastain's as an action star. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it failed at the box office but gained traction on demand.

In the biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021), Chastain and Andrew Garfield starred as the televangelists Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker. She acquired the rights to Faye's life in 2012 and produced the film under her company Freckle Films. Chastain wore prosthetic makeup, which took 4–7 hours to apply, to look like Faye. She also had to sing, something that she has described as tense. She performed seven songs on the film's soundtrack with music producer Dave Cobb. Chastain was the "only reason" to see this curiously tepid biopic, according to David Fear of Rolling Stone, who praised her for going beyond the script to humanize Faye. Kevin Maher of The Times called it a "rive, unleashed, and award-worthy effort" and compared it to Joaquin Phoenix's Joker's (2019). In addition to a Golden Globe nomination, she received the Academy Award for Best Actress, Critics Choice Award, and SAG Award.

Chastain also agreed to Scenes from a Marriage, a gender-switched reimagining of Ingmar Bergman's 1973 Swedish miniseries of the same name for HBO, for its subversion of stereotypical portrayal of women. Chastain and her co-star Oscar Isaac's chemistry was noted, as did Carol Midgley of The Times, who praised them for their "intuitive, wounding dialogue faultlessly." In the same year, she received her second Golden Globe award. She also appeared in The Forgotten, an adaptation of Lawrence Osborne's book of the same name.

Chastain and her crew of female co-stars pitched the idea to prospective buyers at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where Universal Pictures picked it up. Critics characterized the film as generic and unremarkable, and it failed commercially. In James Gray's period film Armageddon Time, Chastain appeared briefly as Maryanne Trump. She played a trauma nurse who discovers that Charles Cullen (played by Eddie Redmayne) is a serial murderer. IndieWire's Kate Erbland found hers to be "an efficient result in a very quiet box."

Chastain will next portray country singer Tammy Wynette in George & Tammy's biographical miniseries George & Tammy, as well as actor Peter Sarsgaard in Michel Franco's film Memory. She has also agreed to act opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in a film adaptation of Tom Clancy's The Division, as well as producer and actress Anne Hathaway in Mothers' Instinct, a Belgian psychological thriller of the same name.

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