Actor, bookworm, feminist, Elvis fanatic: Jessica Chastain on her new film A Most Violent Year

Oscar-nominated star Jessica Chastain tells Jenny McCartney about her latest film, rescue dogs and why she won’t date actors
Quirky star: Jessica Chastain (Picture: Eyevine)
Eyevine
Jenny McCartney23 January 2015

In the subtle luxury of a room at the Soho Hotel, Hollywood star Jessica Chastain says a warm hello, then politely offers me a drink of water and a share of her open packet of crisps. I decline a crisp — although in other settings I find them worryingly addictive. The petite Chastain, on the other hand, looks as if she knows exactly when to stop.

She arrived in London that morning on an overnight flight from New York, but when we meet at lunchtime she seems both refreshed and immaculate: fine-boned, with translucent skin and her signature silky flame of hair, which in photographs — depending on the light — can run the gamut from apricot to fox-pelt. Her little black dress with the white Peter Pan collar (by the cult New York label Ruffian) seems quirkily fashionable rather than prim.

Still, there’s a whiff of the old-fashioned movie actress to Chastain rather than the take-me-as-I-am arrogance of much modern celebrity: it’s there in the grooming and the upright posture — a legacy, perhaps, of her teenage ballet training. No matter what she does, you get the sense that she intends to do it properly.

Chastain, 37, is in town to promote A Most Violent Year, J C Chandor’s edgily atmospheric tale of an ambitious married couple expanding an oil supply business in New York in 1981, when the city was beset by soaring crime and social decay. She plays Anna Morales, a glamorous, chain-smoking blonde who steers her husband Abel’s risky rise through a crooked industry, goading him towards streetwise criminality while he struggles for respectability.

Old school: Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain in A Most Violent Year. They have known each other since drama college

Anna is a piece of work, so what inspired the character? “Dick Cheney,” the former US vice-president, she replies. It transpires that she thinks of Anna, the dark realist, as Cheney to Abel’s George W Bush: “One is the face of the operation, and the other is doing — I guess the brains — but the corrupt brains.”

Abel is played by her old friend from New York’s Juilliard drama school, Oscar Isaac, previously best known for Inside Llewyn Davis: both former fellow students are now roaringly successful. Although A Most Violent Year missed out on an Oscar nomination, last week Chastain received the US Critics’ Choice Most Valuable Player award, in recognition of a year that included her role in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. She used the acceptance speech to plead for “greater diversity” in Hollywood (particularly timely this time around, in which not a single non-white actor was Oscar-nominated, although Chastain says she was speaking to the industry in general rather than any single awards panel.)

Do Hollywood power-brokers approach her differently now? “Yes,” she smiles: “I was talking to Oscar Isaac about this — the second your career starts going well you get all these people coming to you and saying, ‘I always knew.’”

Back in 2004, when she started auditioning, things were different: “You’d memorise 20 pages the night before and then you’d show up and they’d look at you and go, ‘OK, just one scene.’”

Were there weird auditions? “My God, there were so many.” She describes one with a — discreetly unnamed — famous actor who was “not a very nice person… it was a terrible audition. Even before I started reading I knew I didn’t want the part. It was a ‘chemistry read’ and I was like uh-uh, not for me. But that was very rare. Most people in the industry are actually nice.” I don’t get the impression, however, that such encounters ever fundamentally dented Chastain’s quiet determination.

She grew up in Sacramento, California, with a firefighter stepfather, a mother who was a vegan chef and a work ethic that wouldn’t lie down. Even early on, serious players spotted her talent: during her final year at Juilliard, John Wells — the producer of The West Wing and ER — signed her to a 12-month holding contract.

“I’m a really thrifty person — I can make a dollar last a long time because I never had a lot — so that money lasted me for two years, and I never had to take a job waiting tables. Even when I wasn’t acting I was always working on my own: going to the library, writing and reading, taking a community yoga class so that I could study movement.”

Al Pacino cast her in his stage production of Salome in 2006 but her breakthrough year in cinema was 2011, with roles both as the ethereal Fifties mother in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, and sweet-natured blonde bombshell Celia Foote in The Help, for which she was Oscar-nominated.

In 2013, she received another Oscar nod for her role as Maya in Zero Dark Thirty, the ferociously focused female CIA agent who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Today Chastain is undeniably, globally famous in the traditional sense, besieged with designer dresses and offers of magazine cover shoots. Yet she seems determined not to let fame loom so large that it overshadows her actual work. “I think you can control it. I think for some people there’s a moment where you start dating another very famous person, or something happens when a movie takes off, and you can either say, ‘Right, I’m going to go with this and multiply it,’ or you can take a back seat for a while and let it die down.”

Chastain, with her natural reserve and absence of fakery, clearly avoids the inflammation of celebrity. That is one reason, perhaps, behind her former vow not to date fellow actors. Instead, she is — reportedly happily — going out with a raffishly handsome Italian fashion industry executive, Count Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo (one website proclaimed: “Who is Jessica Chastain dating? A freakin’ count who looks like a menswear model.”) Given her ferocious schedule, the relationship must be full of partings and jet-setting reconciliations. She seems, though, to relish the travel: “I have the best job in the world.”

Despite her distinctive colouring, there is a chameleon quality to Chastain: she can look strikingly different in photographs, just as she seems able to slip in and out of characters, from tender to flinty, and could easily pass for someone 10 years younger.

She admits to a tendency to overwork: “I really like having a structure about my life. But then when the structure goes away I feel very lost.” So how does she relax? “It takes a while, to be honest. I read. But sometimes when I’m working I have to turn off my brain and not think so much: I watch a lot of television shows.” Even so, the television shows tend to link to whatever role is in the pipeline: “I’ll still stay in the realm of what I’m doing.”

Drama is clearly in her bloodstream: on this London visit she’s looking up a good play to watch. She’d love to work with the director Michael Haneke, she says, or with Pedro Almodóvar, or to do a Bollywood film one day.

She now has an apartment in Greenwich Village, a three-legged rescue dog called Chaplin, and a Twitter account that describes her as an “actor, bookworm, feminist, Elvis fanatic, friend of animals everywhere…”

Early Elvis or Las Vegas Elvis? “I have the DVD of the 1968 comeback concert where he first put on the jumpsuit,” she says. “It’s so amazing, I sometimes just put it on TV without the sound, if my friends don’t want to listen to Elvis all the time.”

It’s interesting that she is so drawn to Elvis, I think, because his trajectory was so different from her own — a personality in some ways devoured by fame rather than in control of it. Does her own celebrity ever feel like pressure? “No. When someone recognises me in New York they go ‘Hey!’ but I’m not the most important part of their day.”

It’s endearing, somehow, that she believes that. It will certainly help keep her sane. But, increasingly, I’m not so sure it’s true.

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