Celebrity interviews

The actor finds liberation in transformation, taking on roles that challenge convention while keeping her own life beautifully out of focus.

The trailer for Jessica Chastain’s horror movie Other Mommy seems innocently domestic at first. Her character ponders lunch prep with, we assume, a daughter. Then her tone darkens: “You were in my heart. Can I go into your heart?” A kitchen fire erupts, and Chastain is suddenly revealed as a maniacally grinning spiderlike creature contorted under a table. “One of the best jump scares I’ve ever experienced,” one cinemagoer opined online as the trailer went viral. In the movie, based on Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House, Chastain plays a mother and her demonic doppelganger, Other Mommy.

Just like her character, Chastain, 49, is a master shape-shifter. After studying at Juilliard, then building a film and TV career, her breakout role was ostracized housewife Celia in The Help (2011), for which she won a raft of award nominations, including an Oscar. In 2012, she secured another Oscar nod for portraying a CIA analyst in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. Her lone Oscar win was for playing TV evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye in 2022, which was produced by her company, Freckle Films.

Chastain achieved her A-list status by avoiding typecasting. Her roles are calculated chameleonic exercises for an actor focused on being known for her work rather than her private life, variously transforming into a spy, a zookeeper, an astronaut, and a gambler in movies including the critically lauded Interstellar, The Martian, and Molly’s Game. She has also appeared on Broadway — again to award-nominated acclaim — in The Heiress (2012) and Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (2023). Chastain says the latter “wrecked” her, but that she will return to Broadway.

In a New York photography studio, a fresh Chastain metamorphosis is in full swing. For one, her familiar long hair has been supplanted by a bob, which she unveiled on Instagram in April. After the dress-up of the photoshoot, Chastain (now in casual daywear) and her team are all business. A car has been ordered. Assistants relay messages. You sense she’s an innate multitasker, adept at switching focus in a blink.

Taking a seat — we may be on the move soon — Chastain laughs about the response to the Other Mommy trailer. “They added some limbs to create that effect,” she says. “My only forms of exercise are moving suitcases around and yoga. I’m glad it surprised people who probably first thought it was a macaroni-and-cheese commercial.”

In another upcoming Chastain movie, Heartland, she plays a country music singer searching for her niece. “My character was run out of Nashville and has been hiding on a pecan farm for 20 years,” Chastain says. The role means she’ll be singing country again, just as she did playing Tammy Wynette in George & Tammy.

“I like switching up my genres,” Chastain says. “I approach all my roles differently and create a workbook for each character — questions, notes, everything I should know about them.” There’s a rigorous method behind her many roles; on and off camera she seems to be a focused boss. She’s as engaged talking about spending time in nature with her family and New York as her cherished home city as she is about the roles she plays, the projects she produces, and the advocacy she’s proud to front.

These different identities (work and home, fiction and reality, actor and producer) require strict boundary maintenance, she says. Her experiences of parenting and motherhood — she and husband, Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo, have two children — did not inform her role in Other Mommy, and she declines to discuss her home life. “I don’t think about my family when I’m acting. I don’t want the worlds to overlap. I have very strong boundaries. But just as in The Tree of Life [2011], when I didn’t have children and I played a mother, I don’t think you need to experience something to play it. I use my imagination and do my research.”

When playing extreme characters like Other Mommy, “I keep the chaos on-screen,” Chastain says. “I love the simplicity of my quiet life off-screen. The calmer my day-to-day life is, the more it allows me to go wild and unhinged on-screen.” Her family life is “more important to me than what’s on-screen,” Chastain says. “My simple life is the most important thing to me. I don’t want people to know much about me because I want to protect my work [and] my privacy and keep the chaos out.”

A broader intent underscores Chastain’s opting for so many different fictional faces — and the projects she oversees heading Freckle Films. The aim of the production company, which she founded in 2016, is “to discover material that has female characters at their core and seeks to tell stories of underrepresented characters that have been hidden from our screens for too long. It is our ethos to celebrate voices that aren’t frequently heard, and to aid audiences in understanding alternative points of view.”

“I like playing female characters who aren’t the perfect wife, perfect mother, or supportive partner,” Chastain says. “I like thorny edges and complications because that’s what life is and women are. The film industry — especially in the United States — tries to sand down women’s sharper edges to something softer, more palatable and well-behaved. I want young girls to see women who don’t behave, whose voices are louder, or who don’t play by the rules that have been established and that don’t work. The idea that women can be anything, not just what society dictates, is important for both little girls and boys to see.”

As a feminist — Chastain walked in the 2017 Women’s March and helped lead Hollywood’s TimesUp movement in 2018 — she won’t “sign up to a role that feels old-fashioned in how it views women. And I’m happy to tell a director, writer, or studio about why I might pass on a project because of that.”

The blur of activity when we meet is likely because the shape-shifting comes with a dizzying amount of juggling. Running Freckle Films is a job in itself, alongside Chastain’s acting and advocacy, which often dovetail. In a forthcoming miniseries, Off Weeks — she and costar Ben Stiller are executive producers — she has ensured her femme fatale character is “more than the stereotype that you usually see.”

Chastain is still calling on Apple TV+ to release The Savant, a show about an anonymous woman who infiltrates online hate groups. She’s the star and an executive producer. The drama, inspired by a 2019 Cosmopolitan article, was postponed days before its scheduled release in September 2025 and immediately after Charlie Kirk was killed. Variety reported it would be released this July, but it wasn’t.

“It’s an incredible show, and it’s important the public sees it,” Chastain says. “This is a real woman, a hero, who has sacrificed so much to keep us safe. She deserves to be acknowledged. Apple knows how I feel. Indefinite limbo is not a good thing. I hope they make an announcement soon.”

Are the progressive causes, including LGBTQ rights, that she has spoken out on currently imperiled? “I look at history,” Chastain says. “After periods of progress there have always been backlashes, but the general direction is incrementally positive.” She has charted this evolution in her industry. “I was just on a production call — all women. Of course, I have my own company. I understand the privilege I have because of my success. All I can do is compare 15 years ago to now, where we have female camera and sound operators. We haven’t fully succeeded. We haven’t erased discrimination. But we are in a completely different place.”

Observing the status of women’s rights under the Trump administration, Chastain says, “It’s horrible, what has happened to women’s bodies and all that, but the Women’s March created an avalanche of unity and collective consciousness. Even though there are efforts to deny rights to many groups of people, you cannot put the genie back in the bottle. I don’t see this country going back to the 1930s and ’40s.”

Sexism persists in Hollywood, Chastain says. “It’s present in every industry. In Hollywood it’s magnified because the media attention makes it harder to commit horrible acts of violence, misogyny, and abuse. I would say it’s a constant problem, and I don’t think we should ever take our foot off the gas to annihilate it. No healthy society should discriminate against or diminish other people.”

Contrary to traditional thinking, Chastain says this is a boom time for actresses of advancing years, citing the variety of female roles and other women — like Amy Adams, Margot Robbie, Reese Witherspoon, and Nicole Kidman — who also run their own production companies. “There are so many artists who are in charge of their careers and not in a situation where they have to ask someone else to value them. When I made [the 2022 woman-led spy thriller] The 355, I was like, ‘Why wait for someone in an office building to greenlight this project, to say these actresses have value?’ ”

Chastain’s resolute self-possession bloomed early. She grew up in Northern California, raised by her single mother, Jerri (and eventually her stepfather, Michael). She has said she was “withdrawn and ill at ease…I always marched to my own drum, but was then lonely because I didn’t fit in.”

The family was poor, “which in some ways gives you more freedom,” Chastain says. “I never had the fear of, ‘If I don’t become successful as an actor it will ruin my life.’ I didn’t have anything to lose.” After performing in local theater productions, she won a scholarship to Juilliard that was funded by Robin Williams.

From the beginning, acting was “like an anthropological experiment learning about people and humanity, an exercise in empathy,” Chastain says. She’s less alarmed than some in Hollywood about the impact of AI, including the creation of nonhuman movie star Tilly Norwood. “I am not disturbed by it because I don’t think anything with ‘artificial’ in its title can replace human beings, especially when it comes to storytelling. I started in the industry because I loved cinema, seeing Meryl Streep and Isabelle Huppert. Watching an artificial avatar like Tilly Norwood may be interesting, but it won’t be as inspiring as watching them.”

Chastain has guarded her privacy since she was young, studying the industry “as an outsider and audience member. I came to realize I didn’t know anything about the personal lives of the actors I loved most. If I don’t maintain that boundary of privacy, I’m diluting the work because I’m telling the audience so much about my personal life that they are carrying that baggage into the movie theater. I want them to believe me as the character on-screen.”

“I’m a shy person,” she adds. “I even feel shy when people sing me ‘Happy Birthday.’ It’s interesting that I’ve chosen a career where people look at me because in my personal life, I don’t want to be the center of attention. I just want to kind of disappear.”

When she and her family recently went camping in Arizona, she was “stopped all the time” while grocery shopping. “That’s why I live in New York,” she says, laughing. “I can disappear here. I take the subway every day. Sometimes people go, ‘Oh Chastain!’ But in this city I am never the most important part of a stranger’s day. I love it here, the inclusivity and diversity. I’m such a New Yorker. This is my city.”

Chastain returns to California frequently for work and to see her mother, stepfather, and grandmother. “When I go, I don’t stay in Hollywood,” she says. “I stay by the ocean. I like to be close to nature. California has such incredible vistas. I love the towns up and down the coast. My favorite drive is along the Pacific Coast Highway, from San Francisco to L.A. When I graduated from Juilliard, three girlfriends from school and I flew to San Francisco, rented a convertible, and drove it.”

She particularly loves Big Sur, Pismo Beach, Santa Cruz, Fort Bragg, and — off the highway — the town of Solvang. Chastain, who is vegan, says her favorite California restaurants are the plant-based Crossroads in Los Angeles and Millennium in San Francisco.

Back in New York, she is plotting her Broadway return. “It’s been three years,” she says. “I’m ready. I’m reading really exciting scripts.” Choosing the winning script depends on what the play involves. “Doing A Doll’s House eight times a week wrecked me,” Chastain says. “Sitting in a chair as I did for the whole show sounds easy. It wasn’t. You want to move. Emotionally, every night for four months, it was like having a panic attack. When I’m acting I feel everything. I know the situation is fake, but the emotion and the stress on my body are real. I had never taken anything to help me sleep until that play, but my doctor said to me, ‘You’re not sleeping. You have to sleep.’ I had so much energy after the show. I would come home and eat a full meal at 2 a.m. For my next play, I have to consider ‘What experience am I going to have? Am I going to be able to sustain it for four months?’ ”

Another appointment beckons, with Chastain solicitously firming up a future phone date so we can finish our conversation. As assistants descend to prepare for her next meeting, I ask how she feels about turning 50 next year. “I don’t think of it as a benchmark,” she says. “I think people who become obsessed with their age and numbers and feel sad about it are usually people who don’t feel they have accomplished the things they want, or don’t have the things they want. I don’t think about aging. Honestly, I feel really satisfied. I have achieved way more than I would ever have imagined.”

Asked about her new bob (styled by celebrity hairdresser Renato Campora), Chastain laughs. “I wanted something fun for summer. I felt like a paper doll, I had had the same look for so long. This cut is incredibly classic, timeless, and chic. I’m excited to explore another facet of my personality.”

The shape-shifting, personal and professional, will continue in earnest. “I’ve got to do some Tennessee Williams,” Chastain says about her dream future roles. “His writing speaks to me in a profound way. I’d love to play Alma in Summer and Smoke and/or Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Whichever character guise she assumes next, or whatever project she produces — this movie star in perpetual motion — Chastain remains zealously focused on plurality and purpose. “My main question is, ‘How can I be of service?’ I don’t want to just sit around. I want to participate and be challenged.”