The one actor Jessica Chastain is desperate to work with: “Since I was a little kid”
Having Jessica Chastain in your movie is usually a sign of high quality. Despite not making her screen debut until age 31, the actor has appeared in some incredibly well-received films. These include racial drama The Help, in which she played an outcast socialite, spy thriller Zero Dark Thirty, where she portrayed a CIA officer on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, and Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic Interstellar, in which she appeared as brilliant scientist and emotional core of the movie, Murph Cooper.
That last role allowed her to share the billing with legends like Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Michael Caine, who are just a handful of stars that Chastain has worked with over the years. However, according to the Oscar winner herself, one name has eluded her for her entire career.
In 2017, The Hollywood Reporter gathered together six female actors for a roundtable discussion. The conversation covered all sorts of ground, including which performers, alive or dead, the ladies most wanted to work with. “Gary Oldman and Isabelle Huppert are my favourites,” Chastain revealed. “But Isabelle played my mother in a movie. So Gary Oldman for sure. Since I was a little kid, he is someone that, when you watch from performance to performance — he doesn’t look like himself.”
Isabelle Huppert played Chastain’s mother in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, a collection of three films from director Ned Benson. Chastain appears as the titular character, whose life is examined through three different viewpoints: her own, her husband’s (James McAvoy), and a combined perspective. Interestingly, Chastain has actually worked on a project with Oldman – 2012’s Lawless. Either she meant that she didn’t have any scenes with the British star so wanted to work with him properly, or she simply forgot about this film. That seems unlikely, though, unless Oldman really is that good at disguising himself…
Jennifer Lawrence, another participant in the roundtable, argued that Chastain stole Oldman as an answer from her. After conceding, she eventually named Bill Murray as her chosen collaborator, but with the caveat of, “I hate answering these questions because there are just too many.” Emma Stone said both Diane Keaton and Hank Azaria, the latter of which she called “criminally underrated and brilliant,” which Mary J. Blige namechecked Angela Bassett and Frank Sinatra. She also pointed at fellow chat member Alison Janney, saying, “She is just amazing in Juno. She made me laugh till I cried.”
When asked about a memorable piece of advice she’d been given, Chastain referenced Al Pacino, who directed her in the 2011 docudrama Wilde Salomé. “He said that for film, it has to be real,” she recalled. “So whatever you are feeling, the camera is an extension. It can see more into you than your scene partner. Look at it not like it’s a separate thing but like it’s part of your body almost; it has a direct link to your soul. Whatever you’re feeling, you can try to hide it, but the camera is going to get it.
2024 saw just one film released starring Chastain, the suburban psychological drama Mothers’ Instinct. However, 2025 is shaping up to be a busy year, as she will be appearing as Goneril in Lear Rex, a big-screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, and in Dreams, a drama by After Lucia director Michel Franco.
