The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I’m looking for men to be Bond boys’
Jessica Chastain is an actor, a non-stop campaigner and a new mother. How does she do it all, asks Joshua Rivera
Flick through Jessica Chastain’s Instagram and Twitter feeds, and her constant activism can feel exhausting. One minute she’s waging a war against airlines who don’t pay air hostesses enough, the next she’s shaming department stores selling gender-specific baby clothes.
She is a supporter of the Time’s Up movement against sexual harassment and supports a charity that helps with depression at American high schools. Naturally she’s vegan, and an animal lover.
But a few hours before our meeting, the 41-year-old launched a rather less earnest campaign: a search for a “Bond boy” (as opposed to a “Bond girl”) to star in her new espionage thriller 355.
“If you were going to make an ensemble female action movie and you needed a #BondBoy who would you cast? Asking for a friend. #eyecandyneeded,” she tweeted, along with a GIF of Daniel Craig emerging from the ocean in the film Casino Royale.
“I want to give the opportunity for men to step forward,” she says playfully as we sit down to talk in a hotel lounge near Manhattan’s Central Park. “The funny thing is that there’s so many men that I’ve worked with, and also a lot of men that I know [who] would love to be in a film where they just show up and get to be cute, you know?”
Judging from the 3,000 exuberant suggestions beneath her tweet, including an offer from Pedro Pascal (DEA agent Javier Peña in Narcos and Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) she won’t be short of hunks in trunks.
“I’m all about eye candy,” she says, with a smile. “But for so long, only women have been cast as the eye candy in action films. So let’s just be equal.”
Equality is a running thread in Chastain’s career. Since exploding on to the scene in 2011, when she starred in no fewer than six films, including Take Shelter (directed by Jeff Nichols), Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Tate Taylor’s The Help, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, the actress has gained a reputation for playing tough women who are not just, in her words, “plot devices or props to push the male story forward”.
In recent years, this has included real-life ski-prodigy-turnedunderground-poker-impresario Molly Brown in Molly’s Game, and a hard-nosed Washington lobbyist who takes on defenders of the Second Amendment in Miss Sloane. She also specialises in women – like Maya, the CIA analyst who tracks down Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty (her second Oscar nomination) – who try to change the world, often at tremendous personal cost.
She pauses for a moment when I bring this up.
“There’s a lot of martyrdom, isn’t there?” she says, pondering the theme. “These women, in some sense, sacrificing a life for someone else, or for something bigger than themselves. That’s interesting. I never thought of that.”
She has, however, been open about the strong women in her own life. Her mother, a chef, had to bring up Chastain and her two siblings on a shoestring after her biological father, a rock musician, walked out on the family, and there were days, the actress has said, when there was “no food on the table”. There were also frequent evictions, and, on one occasion, a slap in the face by her mother’s then violent boyfriend.
“I just kicked him in the genitals, and he fell to the ground immediately. It was me, my sister and my brother – and I remember looking at my sister’s face, and we were both like, ‘Oh, my God, what did I just do?’ And then I ran out of the house. But I always look back on that moment as knowing that, OK, if anything happens to me, I’m capable of fighting back.”
When an actress like Jessica says, ‘I want to do a film’ that film gets made