“I love the lyrics. I love the music”: the song Jessica Chastain called “one of the best ever written”
Had things gone to plan, Jessica Chastain would have been on Apple TV+ this week in her new show The Savant, a thriller about efforts to stop online extremists in their tracks, but the company decided to postpone it at the last minute in the light of recent events.
Chastain wasn’t best pleased about it by all accounts, and it leaves her only project this year as the recently released Dreams, the story of a Mexican immigrant falling for a wealthy socialite.
That one showed Chastain isn’t one to shy away from a potentially polarising theme or two, and that’s been the case for some time now. She’s poured her efforts into feminist causes over the past decade, turning down work if she feels the salaries on offer aren’t on par with the men involved, she’s invested in a women’s soccer team called Angel FC, and she even travelled to Ukraine in 2021 in the first few months of the invasion to lend support.
Not that she’s done badly in her primary profession it should be noted – she’d been getting regular acclaim since the start of the 2010s when she picked up two Oscar nominations in quick succession, first for 2011’s The Help and then for the Bin Laden assasination movie Zero Dark Thirty a year later.
But she had to wait another decade to win her Oscar – it came with 2021’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a film about a US TV evangelist who built a Christian theme park but went against the norm by supporting LGBTQ causes. Chastain’s own production company made the film, and she had to sit for hours in the make-up chair to have prosthetics applied each day in order to play the lead, plus she sang several songs for the soundtrack.
Her musical side was also on display a year later when she teamed up with Michael Shannon for the miniseries George and Tammy, about the lives of country musicians George Jones and Tammy Wynette, a couple who recorded often together while experiencing a tumultuous relationship in the 1970s.
Again, Chastain took on singing duties alongside Shannon for the series, performing the songs live on set, saying of the experience: “No one’s going to sound like Tammy Wynette. No one’s going to sound like George Jones, but we’ve got to figure out how to emotionally tell their story through songs”.
She got so immersed in the role that she found it incredibly difficult to perform some numbers, including the classic cut ‘Help me make it through the night’ which she struggled to get through without crying. One of the songs by the duo did really resonate with her however; a track originally recorded just by Jones on his 1964 album I Get Lonely In a Hurry.
Asked about her favourite George and Tammy song, Chastain said: “I love ‘The Race Is On’, I think that’s one of the best songs ever written. I love the lyrics. I love the music. And for her (Tammy), ‘Apartment No. 9’. That’s pretty great.”
Despite the fate of The Savant, which has been indefinitely postponed without a new release date, Chastain has plenty of projects on the go in various states of development, including Assassination, a film that reimagines the killing of JFK, alongside Al Pacino and a TV series with Jake Gylenhaal called Nemesis. She also has a horror movie coming out next year called ‘Other Mommy’ about a sinister entity living in an eight-year-old’s closet.
