Jessica Chastain to Aaron Sorkin: Deal me in
The actress played a winning hand for Molly’s Game, the debut director’s high-stakes poker drama.
BEVERLY HILLS – Aaron Sorkin is his own brand in Hollywood, thanks to writing projects like The West
Wing and Moneyball. As he prepared to step behind the camera for the first time to direct the poker drama Molly’s Game (in theaters Christmas Day in most large cities, including New York, L.A., Las Vegas and Atlanta, nationwide Jan. 5), you’d assume he’d be laying out the cards for his leading lady.
But “I had to sell him on casting me!” says Jessica Chastain. “Every actress in Hollywood wanted this part.”
It didn’t take long. “Two minutes into the meeting, she said, ‘Listen, this meeting is stupid. You know you should just give me the part,’ ” laughs Sorkin, 56, sitting on a couch with Chastain, 40.
In Molly’s Game, she plays Molly Bloom, a real woman who, as a 26year-old, made waves a decade ago in Hollywood by hosting a high-stakes poker game that attracted famous actors (including Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire) and A-list producers. A Colorado native and former competitive skier, Bloom eventually took her skills to New York, where hedge-funders, pro baseball players and, ultimately, Russian mobsters partook in her game.
While hosting poker games isn’t illegal, taking a rake (or percentage) off the table is, and Bloom was raided by the FBI in 2011.
Bloom pleaded guilty, avoiding jail time but walking away hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. When she sold her story to Hollywood, “it’s not that everything was good and I’d accomplished a lot of things and someone wanted to write a movie about me,” she says by phone. “My life was in shambles. I wrote this pitch to Hollywood as part of a way to figure it out.”
In Molly’s Game, Chastain speaks rapid-fire Sorkinese and does a 180 from her off-camera image, wearing clingy, cleavage-baring outfits and layers of smoky makeup.
Chastain studied photos of Bloom’s expensive bandage dresses (and videos of the Kardashians contouring) to get the manicured look right, eventually realizing that Bloom used the pricey wardrobe to “become visible” and harness power in a male-dominated industry.
“So many people after screenings will come up to me and say, ‘You’ve never looked better.’ I’m like, ‘Please don’t say that!’ Because every day it was like three hours of hair and makeup or something crazy,” she says.
Today, Bloom says she’s putting her life back together. “I’m a convicted felon for life. That’s the deal there,” she says. “But this has all been hugely helpful. I moved back to Colorado and I have my own apartment again. I don’t live with my mom. I have my own bank account again. I have a lot of hope.”
With sexual harassment headlines dominatingtoday, Chastain, who has earned Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice nominations for the role, says she’s lucky to have broken through in the industry six years ago as an adult. “I could decide not to work with a bully,” she says.
Still, she remembers, “the first year that my films came out, as exciting as it was for me to finally have a place at the table, I felt at the same time this crippling fear that if I did anything or said something that was taken the wrong way, or offended the wrong person that it would all be taken away from me. It was the sense of powerlessness that I realized being a woman in Hollywood was.”
Her hope is that the Hollywood headlines embolden women in all industries “to come forward and speak up. Because we’re living in 2017. And it’s just unacceptable.”
It’s a lesson, Chastain says, about “every woman who is struggling for someone to acknowledge her talents, her ideas, her work in an industry where it’s a harder road ... where she’s really not being heard for the person she is but more for the shiny object she’s become.”