Women are often underestimated... Female spies use it to their advantage
High-octane spy thriller the 355 puts its female leads in the thick of the action. GEORGIA HUMPHREYS meets star and producer Jessica Chastain to discuss what inspired her to create the film
FOR Jessica Chastain, creating The 355 was a “rebellious act”.
It’s a female ensemble film – a globetrotting espionage thriller that the California native, 44, feels like “the studio system could have made a long time ago, but chose not to”.
And so the Oscar-nominated actress, who plays wild card CIA agent Mason “Mace” Brown, found it really empowering to bring this project to life and work on it from the very beginning.
It was Jessica who first pitched the idea to Simon Kinberg, who she worked with on X-Men: Dark Phoenix (he ended up being director and cowriter of The 355, while they both have producer credits).
“We were confused how we got away with actually making the film,” quips Jessica, who’s known for roles in Zero Dark Thirty, The Help, and Molly’s Game. “It was really exciting to be on this production where all the female characters are the bosses of the film – like we’re in charge, in a way.
“We helped raise the financing, we developed the characters along with Simon Kinberg, and so it felt incredibly empowering to make this in the independent way that we had.”
It was a “dream job” for Jessica. “I joke that I’m so glad I invented it; I’m so glad that I invented that I got to work with Lupita [Nyong’o] and Penelope [Cruz] and Diane [Kruger] and Bingbing [Fan] and Edgar [Ramirez] and Sebastian [Stan], and day one of shooting was in Paris.”
This is a stellar cast. Diane Kruger plays Marie, a badass German agent who is a rival for Mace at first, but they work together when a top-secret weapon falls into mercenary hands.
Mace also calls in the help of her friend and former MI6 ally, Khadijah (Nyong’o), a cutting-edge computer specialist, and along the way they meet Graciela (Cruz), a Colombian psychologist.
Together, their mission is to retrieve the weapon before it’s too late, facing plenty of obstacles along the way, such as a mysterious woman, Lin Mi Sheng [Fan] tracking them, and questions over who exactly they can trust.
But this is one fierce group of women, as we see from intense action sequences that take place around the world, from Morocco to Shanghai.
“Every day was tough,” admits Jessica, when asked about the stunts involved. “The freezer fight with Diane was really difficult – that we worked on for weeks before the cameras ever even rolled on the film, before our first day of shooting.
“We were really comfortable with that fight by the time we got to shoot it, because we had practised it for so long. But it’s tough – she is a great opponent. I underestimated her strength. I was very sore the next day.”
There was also a scene where Jessica had to do a “flying leap” off a building.
“It was terrifying! You could practise working with a harness, but when I was up there and I had to just run and leap across onto that ship that was leaving, there was no way to really practise it.
“I didn’t know for sure that the harness was going to catch me, because you don’t feel the harness, and I tried to sit down to be like, ‘Do you guys really have me?’ But that was emotionally difficult to do.”
“They initially were just going to use the stunt performer and I said, ‘No, no,
I want to do everything’,” she adds.
“I got up there and it was much higher than I thought, and our coordinator looked at me and he said, ‘Jessica, you don’t have to do this’, because I think he saw the white of my eyes, like the fear. And I looked around and I saw the entire crew of the film... They were all looking at me because they were shocked that I was going to do it.
“I could not stomach getting back into the crane and going all the way down. So I said, ‘No, no, I’m going to do it’. And the crew was so sweet afterwards – they were so supportive and wonderful.”
As for the appeal of her character, Jessica says: “Mace is this archetype that you see in all of these action films; usually it’s a dude, where he’s the loner type, and you can tell there’s been a history and they have difficulty trusting people. We really wanted to embrace that kind of archetype for Mace in our film.”
A big message of the movie appears to be the idea that women are often underestimated – and the star notes that is exactly what makes females really good at espionage.
“They use that skill, I guess that sexism, to their advantage,” she says. “People underestimate what they’re capable of, and in the past, women have, in some sense, been invisible in society – not in terms of appearance, but in terms of their drive, their skills, their intellect. It’s something that hasn’t really been acknowledged, I guess, in media and in our society.”
It’s why they decided to use the title The 355 - this was the “secret code name for the first female spy in the American Revolution, George Washington’s female spy”.
“Her identity is still unknown to this day, but it’s used as a moniker, I guess, by women who work currently in espionage,” explains Jessica.
“The 355 is a way of honouring her, whoever she was – the woman who worked in the shadows.”
Our [stunt] coordinator looked at me and he said, ‘Jessica, you don’t have to do this