Q&A Hollywood
Q:There are striking resemblances between Julia Roberts and Jessica Chastain. Are they related at all?
A: No, but Bryce Dallas Howard thanks you for asking.
Jessica Chastain, the willowy, red-haired star best known for her Oscarnominated turns in “Zero DarkThirty” (2012) and “The Help” (2011), does share a few physical (and career) similarities with Julia Roberts, best known for being Julia Roberts.
However, she shares more similarities with “Jurassic World” (2015) star Bryce Dallas Howard, and I’m not the only one to point it out.
People had already been joking about it for a while when, in 2015, aYouTube user going by the name “legolambs” wrote and posted a joke song called “I Am Not Jessica Chastain (Bryce Dallas Howard).” It’s written from the perspective of Howard and the chorus is, simply, “I am not Jessica Chastain.”
The pair even got in on the joke themselves. Howard filmed herself lip-syncing to the song, and Chastain posted the video on her own Instagram, either clarifying or further confusing the situation.
To be fair, it’s not just their looks. Howard and Chastain’s career arcs are similar as well — their biggest films came in the mid-’10s, and they even appeared in “The Help” together in 2011, when the moviegoing public was still getting to know them.
Roberts, on the other hand, was a megastar before these two even started working — almost. Her biggest years were in the mid-’90s, though her first hit was 1988’s “Mystic Pizza.”That was a year before Howard had her film “debut,” though it was just as a background extra in a movie her dad, Hollywood mogul Ron Howard, was
making. If you look really hard, you can see Bryce in a scene in 1989’s “Parenthood,” when she was just 8 years old.
Her first real role — like, with lines — was 2000’s “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.” (Chastain’s first role, for the record, was a guest spot in a 2004 episode of “ER.”)
Q: What happened to William Petersen after he left “CSI”?
A: William Petersen, best known as Gil Grissom in CBS’s procedural smash “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” was never a prolific screen actor. Deadline.com once called him “one of those highly selective actors who never wore out his welcome.”
He seemed to take that to extremes with “CSI.” He was so concerned with wearing out his welcome that he left the show early, and then mostly dropped out of the screen biz in favor of theatrical acting back in Chicago, where he got his start.
And that’s mostly “what happened” to Petersen. He’s taken a total of five screen roles since leaving “CSI” in 2009, and when he wasn’t doing those he was busting a hump on a Windy City stage.
If you really miss hanging out with Petersen and you aren’t fortunate enough to live in Chicago, I have two pieces of good news: One of his other screen gigs was a full-timeTV role you might not have heard of (the WGN America drama “Manhattan”), and “CSI” might be coming back.
He appeared in all 10 episodes of the second season of the period military drama “Manhattan” in 2015 — it was canceled after that, but you can still find it if you look.
But you could also just be patient and wait to see whether the planned “CSI” revival goes ahead, and, if it does, whether it includes Petersen.
Back in February, rumors started swirling that a “CSI” revival miniseries would happen on CBS.There’s still no official word on it, nor which, if any, of the cast will return.
The plan was reportedly to time it with the show’s 20th anniversary in October.The clock’s obviously ticking on that, but the “CSI” team was always good under pressure.
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