‘The audience whoop when Dan walks out on stage … and James is a dreamboat’

 
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Louise Jury22 January 2013

She has played the wife of two of Britain’s most popular actors, but Jessica Chastain is currently most enamoured of her own character as a CIA agent succeeding in a tough man’s world.

She obviously adores Dan Stevens, her co-star in Broadway play The Heiress. “He’s become a bit like Elvis in the States. He walks out on stage and you get a lot of whooping. He’s definitely become quite a sex symbol.”

And she says of James McAvoy, in their double-bill film The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: “He was an absolute dreamboat.”

But the 35-year-old reserved her greatest praise for her role as Maya in Zero Dark Thirty and also for director Kathryn Bigelow, for whom she says she would do “anything”.

Chastain won a best actress Golden Globe last week for her performance in the story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and is so committed to supporting the film — which opens here on Friday — that she flew to Britain after finishing her Broadway show on Sunday night.

“It’s an incredible feat of fearless film-making,” she said, adding that the role was “the most difficult thing I’ve ever worked on in my life”, not least for its controversial portrayal of the extreme torture which Maya observes.

“I’m playing a woman who has been trained to be unemotional. If anyone were to show emotion, it would be frowned upon, but especially a woman, which is already a strike against you in being taken seriously.”

She admitted being surprised at how crucial women CIA operatives were in the operation that led to bin Laden’s death in Pakistan in May 2011. “To discover that women played a very important role in finding Osama bin Laden was good for me. It made me realise I’d been conditioned wrongly [in expectations].”

Other expectations about the battle of the sexes were shattered last weekend when Zero Dark Thirty and another Chastain movie, Mama, a supernatural thriller released here next month, topped the US box office.

“For years, I’ve heard the studios have said to writers and directors not to make films that rely on a female leading character because they won’t make money.” But she said her latest films not only had female leads, but their characters were “strong independent modern women”.

“We’re not used to seeing a woman without her being a victim, a wife or a girlfriend. Feminism’s gotten a bad rap but isn’t every woman a feminist, asking to be treated equally, just asking to be paid the same as a man?”

Despite her Golden Globe win, she made no predictions about her Bafta and Oscar nominations, although she said she felt “bittersweet” about the Academy Award nod because Bigelow had not been nominated.

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