The furore over its torture scenes continues unabated, but Zero Dark Thirty star and Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain is keeping a cool head amid all the hype and controversy. "We are at a very strange moment in the US," she tells DONALD CLARKE
THE HOTEL room door opens and Jessica Chastain, barefoot in a sensible grey dress, is discovered curled up on the sofa. Of course, Jessica Chastain is here. She’s everywhere. The chances are that, as recently as three years ago, you had no idea who she was. Then, in 2011, she found herself cast in seven major pictures, almost all of which were worth seeing. The Tree of Life, The Help, The Debt, Coriolanus, Take Shelter: it looked as if they were cloning the poor woman.
This week, she pops up in Kathryn Bigelow’s eye-wateringly controversial Zero Dark Thirty. That film currently sits at number two in the US box-office charts. The top-placed film is a supernatural shocker called Mama. That film also stars . . . Oh, you can see where this is going.
“I know!” she says in her endearing, enthusiastic voice. “I can’t believe it. The same thing happened last year with The Help and The Debt – movies driven by women. And they say women can’t open a film. Huh?”
Before considering the bends-inducing rise of this versatile, graceful Californian, we had better address the 500lb gorilla lurking in the room. When Zero Dark Thirty, the story of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, opened in the US at the end of 2012, it received thumping reviews and was rapidly installed as a favourite for every award in the cabinet. Then whispers began. What do we make of the scenes that show CIA operatives torturing suspects?
Two linked objections came to the fore. On the right, politicians such as John McCain argued that “harsh techniques” such as waterboarding played no part in the eventual elimination of Osama Bin Laden. To the left, critics suggested that, by presenting the torture with no editorialising, Bigelow was implicitly endorsing the practice.
“This movie is based on first-hand accounts,” Chastain says. “Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, the writer, researched it and it did happen. It’s all over the press. We are at a very strange moment in the US. A CIA agent is going to prison for three years for talking to a journalist about waterboarding. I was on Jon Stewart’s show recently and he said: ‘Oh, so we are allowed to waterboard. We’re just not allowed to talk about it.’ That’s a strange situation.”
So what about the notion that the film is endorsing torture. Chastain’s character, an obsessive CIA analyst named Maya, winces during the waterboarding. But she doesn’t object.
“In the US, you are not allowed to have characters with grey areas,” she says. “It happens all the time in European cinema. Kathryn and Mark didn’t write a scene where somebody says: ‘Oh this is wrong’ because they weren’t making a piece of propaganda.”
In a recent interview, Bigelow claimed that the controversy surprised her. It seemed like a naive comment from an Oscar-winning Hollywood veteran.
“We end the film with an unanswered question: ‘Where do you want to go?’ Do that and you ask the audience to think. Some will appropriate it. Before the film came out, the right were saying it’s a commercial for Obama. Now, because Kathryn left her own politics out, others are saying it’s pro-torture. That did really surprise her. That shocked her. She would never think that.”
At any rate, the controversy is unlikely to do Ms Chastain much harm. Her stunningly focused performance has earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress and she still has an outside chance of beating favourite Jennifer Lawrence to the tape.
She owes it all to Al Pacino. Attendees at last year’s Jameson Dublin International Film Festival may remember the great man turning up to present his weird quasi-documentary Wilde Salome. The film detailed Al’s production of the titular Oscar Wilde drama in Los Angeles. At that stage, Chastain – despite graduating from the prestigious Julliard School in New York – was finding it hard to secure major auditions.
“Oh yeah, that was the big break,” she says. “If you’re in the lead role of a play with Al Pacino, then everybody comes to see it because they want to see Al. And here’s this strange girl on stage with him! Then they were able to phone him for a reference. ‘It’s okay. She’s not crazy. She turns up on time.’ That changed everything. Before that, I was always being told I wasn’t pretty enough and so on.”
Pardon? Currently appearing alongside David Strathairn in the Broadway production of The Heiress, Jessica – spending 24 hours in London between performances – has just made her way straight from Heathrow airport. She can’t barely have slept since the curtain descended. But, at the risk of sounding oily, even in her present state, I find it hard to imagine any casting director describing her as “not pretty enough”. What in the name of heaven were they looking for?
“It’s sweet that you’re saying that,” she says. “It makes me embarrassed saying that. I really didn’t think I looked like the other women in LA. There is something about me that is old-fashioned. I wouldn’t wear tank tops and low-slung jeans to auditions. Nobody knew quite what to do with me.”
Can her red hair and pale complexion still be an issue with the body fascists? Rita Hayworth, Greer Garson, Julianne Moore, Isla Fisher and a dozen other ginger stars have triumphed in Hollywood. That look surely is no longer regarded as odd.
“You know what it is? A writer friend, who is also a redhead, and I were talking the other day. When a script specifies how somebody looks it never says they are redheads. They’ll say ‘blonde’ or ‘brunette’, but never ‘red’. You read those scripts and think: do I belong in this town?”
Raised in the Bay Area to hard-working parents – Mum is a vegan chef and, currently drinking tea with soy milk, Chastain still keeps the faith – she happily admits to a characteristically American mongrel heritage. Born as Jessica Howard, she changed her name to avoid suggestions that she might be part of Ron Howard’s extended family. (Indeed, she looks eerily like her friend and co-star in The Help, Bryce Dallas-Howard, Ron’s daughter.) “Chastain” comes from her grandmother, of French descent, and, yes, the red colouring offers evidence of Irish blood.
“Yes, in my freshman year, my grandmother and I went around Ireland for two weeks,” she says bouncily. “We researched our family in Trinity College and saw Galway and the Cliffs of Moher. We rented a lovely cottage in Kinsale.”
Nobody in the family had any connection with the stage. But Chastain caught the bug after seeing David Cassidy in a touring production of Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. She ploughed away at amateur productions and eventually worked up the courage to audition for Julliard.
“I was just seven or eight when I saw that production of Joseph,” she says. “But I immediately knew that I was an actress. I felt that was what I was, rather than what I wanted to be.”
She recalls delivering a highly eroticised version of Juliet’s “Gallop apace” speech at the audition for Julliard. When the tutors visibly rocked back on their heels she wasn’t entirely sure if they were impressed or horrified. Happily, she secured a scholarship and went on to graduate in 2003. One naively imagines that, after emerging from Julliard, an actor finds doors being flung open wherever he or she goes. Her earlier comments suggest that this is not the case.
“Oh no. They didn’t care at all in LA. They couldn’t care less where you went. I remember they made me read a pre-audition for a day player in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That means you are actually auditioning for the audition. That’s when I realised that stuff meant nothing in Los Angeles.”
It sounds uncomfortable for a woman who felt sure her life lay in acting. There must have been times when she was tempted to throw it all in and do something less stressful.
“No. I don’t think so. I was still really happy,” she says. “Even though I wasn’t making money. I grew up fairly poor and I knew what it was to live without much money. I did stuff every day to remind myself I was an actor. I found a donation-based yoga centre. I knew that as long as I was able to support myself then I would have a happy life. No matter what.”
I wonder, however, if the insecurity ever entirely vanishes. The week before we speak, Chastain got nominated for that Oscar. The Heiress received great reviews. She’s on the cover of a dozen magazines. She has already worked with directors such as Terrence Malick and Kathryn Bigelow.
“Do you know what? The uncertainty doesn’t go away. But, until a week ago, I was still really clenched,” she says. “I was working every second. I have worked so hard to get here and I don’t want it to go away. But after last week, I felt I able to trust myself. Maybe I can even take a month off.”
She rubs her eyes and prods a plate of fruit.
“I don’t need to live in fear.”
Yes. I think she’s all right now.
