Jessica Chastain’s path to stardom began at age 7, after watching a production of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
“My grandmother took me,” Chastain remembers. “It was the first time I realized it was a job that people could have, and after watching it, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m an actor.’”
On Sept. 4, that status will be permanently enshrined in showbiz history when she receives her very own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Even so, the journey from starry-eyed spectator to industry mainstay was anything but a straight line for the actress.
“I felt it really young,” Chastain tells Variety. “Even though I dropped out of high school and went back and got my diploma later on, I was voted ‘Most Talented’ in our yearbook. So very early on, I was getting feedback that it was something I was good at, and that helped a lot.” Despite that praise, the future star of “The Tree of Life,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Interstellar” and “The Martian” hadn’t yet set her sights on anything so ambitious as movie stardom: “I thought I was going to be in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Repertory Company,” she admits.
Her work on stage led to a scholarship at Juilliard, and only after that did she begin to make her first industry inroads. “It was hard auditioning, because don’t think I was a type that people necessarily maybe saw for the character that they were casting physically,” the natural redhead recalls. Critics weren’t altogether kinder: her first high-profile mention in the Hollywood trades came when a 2006 Variety review panned the then 29-year-old’s performance in a production of “Salomé” opposite Al Pacino, one of two former collaborators who will be present at the ceremony to receive her star. The experience proved uniquely instructive.
“It’s something I think is really important for actors to learn, and it was such an example in that scenario, that one person’s opinion isn’t everyone else’s,” she observes. “‘Salomé’ launched me in terms of having a film career,” Chastain insists. “All of a sudden, I started from nothing to get leads, and it was because people went to see that play — and they thought I did a good job.”
Rather than enduring a fallow period, she spent the next five years of her planting seeds that wouldn’t stop blooming: Chastain premiered six films in 2011 alone. “It’s the year I got my first Oscar nomination [for ‘The Help],” she says. “I’d made ‘The Tree of Life’ four years before opposite Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, the biggest actors working at the time. But the years that I had to wait for all this stuff to come out gave me the opportunity to really study how I wanted to be in the industry.”
“The Help” in particular introduced her to Viola Davis, who alongside Pacino will also speak on her behalf at the Sept. 3 event. Davis says she instantly recognized in Chastain a kindred spirit, both as a collaborator and an individual. “‘The Help’ was one of those experiences where, every once in a while, you do a project with people and you know that they’re going to be a part of your life forever.”
“A part of it is because we were all thrust in Greenwood, Miss., for three months — there wasn’t a lot to do but go to Walmart or Sonic,” Davis says. “But with all of those women, Jessica included, not enough can be said about their bravery — the bravery to release one’s vanity, one’s ego, and just to get down to the brass tacks of the work. She’s someone who doesn’t mistake their presence for the event.”
While releasing four more films across 2012, Chastain earned her second Academy Award nomination for playing a CIA analyst in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty.” Showcasing her skillset so vividly in such a short span of time led to opportunities to work with industry legends like Liv Ullmann, Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott and Guillermo Del Toro. It also whet her appetite for roles that were thornier than could be condensed in a script’s cover-page logline. “There was a few years where I was saying, ‘Please, can we stop saying strong female character?” she remembers.
“The reality is biologically, women have a stronger threshold of pain than men — they give birth — so all women are strong,” Chastain points out. “But I’m excited to play characters that are really complex, where I’m OK if someone leaves my film and goes, ‘I’m not sure I liked it.’ I want to push people a little bit outside their comfort zone.”
Since then, she’s done that again and again, with the help of several regular collaborators, including Davis (whom she reunited with in “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby”), Oscar Issac (“A Most Violent Year,” “Scenes From a Marriage”) and Michael Shannon (“Take Shelter,” “George & Tammy”). Chastain acknowledges that there are many incredible filmmakers she wants to work with she’ll likely be unable to, but says there’s one in particular she’s still holding out hope for: “Michael Haneke. I don’t know how many more movies he’s going to make, but I think he’s so incredible.”
Chastain has consistently balanced those patience-testing projects with crowd pleasers, appearing in splashy franchise films like “The Huntsman: Winter’s War,” “Dark Phoenix” and “It: Chapter Two.” “I don’t think in terms of ‘one for me and one for them,’” she maintains. “Because they’ve all got to be for them, and they’ve all got to be for me. Otherwise, what are you doing?” Yet in the absence of certain opportunities being offered to her by virtue of her acting pedigree or box office muscle, Chastain formed Freckle Films in 2016 to develop her own projects. The company’s second film, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” earned Chastain a best actress Oscar.
While nuturing a thriving career and raising two children, Chastain is enrolled at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where she’s getting her master’s degree in public administration. “I am really excited about learning about society from an anthropological point of view,” she says. Perhaps that’s why she seems particularly thrilled about the quotidian pleasures of having her own star on the Walk of Fame, even more than the spectacle. “I’m excited that it’ll just be there, and my kids will be able to take pictures and swipe the gum off of it.”
Yet even if Chastain regards the “incredibly meaningful” honor with a decidedly simpler sense of gratitude and appreciation, Davis is quick to highlight the breadth of accomplishments that the five-pointed landmark encompasses for her friend and colleague. “I see this award as a culmination of one’s career,” Davis says.
“Jessica’s commitment is to the artistry of the work, but also you see her using her platform as a way of leaving a legacy — and what’s really wonderful about Jessica is the anticipation of what and who she is going to become. When I meet her, I always see someone who has a new goal and a new landscape and a new terrain to explore. And I think that’s going to carry her into even her older years. She’s an artist, and she’s an extraordinary human being.”
