The 2014 movie Jessica Chastain was banned from talking about: “Do what we can”
Although it is not unusual for actors to appear in more than one film in the same year, it can cause issues when the releases are stacked up against one another.
Due to the time-consuming nature of the promotion cycles and awards campaigns, some actors might have to choose between the films they’ve appeared in and pick only one that they want to prioritise, but sometimes, the choice is made for them by the studios that they’ve been employed by, as Jessica Chastain found out in 2014.
2014 was a massive year for Chastain, who had, early on, turned in memorable performances in Miss Julie and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, and then harboured major awards hopes at the end of the year with her roles in Christopher Nolan’s science fiction epic Interstellar and the A24 crime drama A Most Violent Year.
The former was slated for release in the first week of November, and became a box office hit, while the latter was scheduled for an awards-qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles in the last week of December, followed by a wider rollout in January, and even though Interstellar was the bigger deal, Chastain’s scene-stealing performance in A Most Violent Year was tipped to be awards-worthy as well and ended up earning her a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role’.
However, the agreement between the two studios made it so Chastain had to spend the majority of her time promoting Interstellar, leaving the campaign for A Most Violent Year out to dry.
Although it was revealed that she had been able to get out of an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman in order to appear at the premiere of Interstellar, she did not go into detail about what the stipulations were, cryptically noting, “I never comment about my contracts or my salary… We all put our heads together and do what we can”.
While A24 would eventually become a much more powerful player within the film industry, in 2014, they were still a smaller distribution company without the rabid fanbase it has today. Although reviews for A Most Violent Year were positive, they weren’t glowing, as the film was considered to be too dark and psychological to break into the ‘Best Picture’ race, so while it was named as the best film of the year by the National Board of Review, it was left out of most other award groups.
Interstellar was an interesting case in which an original film overperformed based on the goodwill that Nolan had earned from his previous work, and although some have tried to retroactively claim that the film was polarising, it was always well-received by critics and those in the industry; its critical scores were always high, with the negativity coming from nitpicking internet pundits and online trolls. The film has only had its reputation heightened over the years in the wake of Nolan’s continued popularity.
A Most Violent Year is a good film that has been overlooked, and it served as the first collaboration between Chastain and Oscar Isaac before they reunited to appear as another married couple on the HBO adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman film Scenes From a Marriage. As disappointing as it is that Chastain didn’t get more attention at the time for A Most Violent Year, she would later win the Oscar for ‘Best Actress’ for The Eyes of Tammy Faye.
