Why Robin Williams will always be an “incredible regret” for Jessica Chastain
Building a Hollywood career is perhaps the toughest job in the world. But Jessica Chastain has managed to achieve such a feat over the last two decades.
To get to the top, you need to grab every single opportunity offered to you, and Chastain has rarely missed such a chance. But that doesn’t mean she is without regrets, and especially when it comes to the man who gave her the big break she needed: Robin Williams.
The story of Chastain’s journey to the top had relatively tough beginnings. Money was tight and Chastain seemed to care very little about school, only attracted to the bright lights of theatre. “I would cut school and sit in my car, reading Shakespeare,” she revealed to Entertainment Weekly. “I dropped out of high school. I was not a hard worker…eventually, I got my adult diploma, but I did not graduate.”
Chastain’s teenage years were consumed by the stage, school seemingly fell by the wayside, but acting never did. And yet, for all that devotion, it wasn’t until she was 21 that she landed her first professional gig. Fittingly, it was Juliet in a Bay Area staging of Romeo and Juliet. Chastain had spent her youth fixated on William Shakespeare, and this was the dream role.
But somewhere amid the lights and lines, a moment came that changed everything. Her Romeo casually mentioned he’d been accepted into Juilliard, the hallowed New York school that Chastain had only ever imagined was for other people. In her mind, Juilliard belonged to another world entirely, the kind of place that didn’t have room for someone with her background.
Juilliard may be a great school, but it comes with a price, and the tuition fee is eye-watering. Though Chastain managed to get herself into the school on merit, she now needed to pay for it. Her extended family pooled their money and worked together to help her achieve her dream.
“I was the first person in my family to go to college,” Chastain told The Guardian. “I was terrified by this idea that my whole family was paying for it, and I could get cut from the programme, because they had a probation system. So, the first year, I was a wreck of anxiety.”
By hook or crook, Chastain and her family muddled through the first two years of her time at Juilliard, but it wasn’t easy. “I felt a responsibility to my family,” she admitted. “My grandmother was sending me money every month. Everyone who was working really hard to see me through college.”
In truth, Chastain’s family might not have been able to swing that third year financially, but at the end of the second, a light at the end of the tunnel appeared in the form of two scholarships paid for by none other than Robin Williams. Chastain applied for one of them and, to her delight, won it, which enabled her to graduate from one of the greatest acting institutions in the world.
Williams was, obviously, a complete stranger to Chastain, and she had never met him in person when her scholarship came through. “I sent him two letters and talked about my desire to meet him and how thankful I was, and I hope someday we could meet,” she told CBS News. However, when word got back to her through her best friend Jess Weixler, who worked with Williams on a movie, that the Mrs Doubtfire icon knew her work and was proud of her, it meant the world.
The closest Chastain came to actually interacting with Williams was years after she graduated. In a restaurant in Los Angeles, coincidentally talking to a film director about her scholarship, when lo and behold, her quiet saviour, Robin Williams sat down at the table beside her. Though she was “freaking out,” Chastain built up the courage to speak to the star, egged on by her director friend, only for the actor to have disappeared by the time she had conjured enough spirit to introduce herself.
Chastain was forced to accept that she’d never be able to let Williams know how much he meant to her life and career following the star’s sad death in 2014. She described it as “an incredible regret in my life” and confessed, “It’s kind of sad to think, when a stranger profoundly changes your life – I mean, he had nothing to gain from it – and I wasn’t given the opportunity to actually pay him back for that.”
Interestingly, though, she later discovered that the anonymity in Williams’ act was entirely the point, and he probably didn’t want to be personally thanked. “We since found out he really helped many, many people behind the scenes, and actually didn’t want to take credit for things,” she remembered. “He kind of avoided credit whenever he could.”
What a gent.
