Jessica Chastain: ‘I like the unlikeable characters. The world is not black and white’

About this time in 2022, when Jessica Chastain won the best-actress Oscar for her portrayal of the disgraced television evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, Michel Franco was concerned. Chastain was due to take a leading role in his new film, Memory. Some of the people involved in the Mexican director’s small, independent production were wondering how they’d wrestle with the demands of an Academy Award-winning star. Other industry figures warned that such a big name as Chastain, who had been nominated for Oscars twice before, was sure to drop out in favour of a bigger movie.

Chastain not only turned up: she also bought her costumes at a Target in Nashville, to help shape the feel of Franco’s film. It’s not a glamorous role. Her character works in a care centre and never wears make-up. The actor styled – or, rather, anti-styled – her own hair every day.

“If I want to be pampered I can go to a spa,” she remarked when Memory was shown in Venice last autumn. She also suggested Peter Sarsgaard as her costar, in a role for which he ultimately won the Volpi Cup at the Italian city’s international film festival.

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“I’ve always wanted to work with Peter,” says Chastain. “I have not hidden my fanship of who he is as an actor. He’s a real artist. Sometimes an actor will change the script or story to fit themselves. But the better path is for that actor to change themselves to fit the script. That’s Peter. I see that in everything he does. He’s a shape-shifter. This is a very low-budget film, so Peter winning Venice put it on the map. There’s no doubt that even being considered for an award draws attention to a movie like this.”

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It’s easy to see why stellar actors were drawn to Franco’s knotty drama. As Memory opens, Chastain’s character, a recovering addict and single mother named Sylvia, reluctantly attends a high-school reunion. She is immediately freaked out by a man who sits beside her, smiling, and even more disconcerted when he follows her home. The man, Saul (Sarsgaard), has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, and he lives under the care of his brother and niece. Sylvia mistakenly believes that Saul was one of several boys who sexually abused her at school. She remains terrified of men – “I asked for a repair woman” she tells the worker who turns up to fix her fridge.

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It’s an unlikely basis for the tender, fraught relationship that ensues. Saul’s living in the moment allows Sylvia to access buried trauma. Emerging family secrets in turn escalate into dramatic scenes between Sylvia and her estranged mother (played by Jessica Harper).

“This film hit part of me,” says Chastain. “With acting, if there’s nothing at stake, then is it worth doing? And that doesn’t mean that there’s mental or physical danger. What is at stake could be that you embarrass yourself. There are a lot of things that could be at stake that aren’t actual danger. And this is the kind of film that, when I talk about certain scenes, I’m emotional when I don’t want to be emotional. I allowed it to internalise in me in a way that can be uncomfortable.”

Franco’s cunning, nervy script plays with the faulty faculty of memory through misdirections, uncertain motivations and denials. One heart-stopping sequence outside a bedroom door threatens to rewrite everything we thought we knew; other scenes probe the nature of caring.

“The world is not black and white,” says Chastain. “Human beings are only shades of grey. Wonderful people do complicated, irresponsible things, and horrible people have tenderness and, at certain points, vulnerabilities in their lives. I never really adhere to this idea that characters need to be likable enough or attractive enough. That feels like a Hollywood-studio demand. But that’s not in European cinema – which is my bread and butter – not in independent cinema and international cinema. Anything that bucks that stereotype allows you to feel like you’re watching real people.

‘It’s not the kind of industry where I can make one film a year and be okay, especially if the films I’m interested in are Michel Franco films’

“There’s this assumption that if you don’t know everything about a character they are somehow scary. That’s what a female fatale is, right? She’s got too many secrets. She must be up to something really dangerous. I think women in particular are expected to be open books, where all their motivations are completely clear – they have no cards up their sleeve. But I think that’s getting worn out. I see films all the time that show all those old tropes are being destroyed.” She laughs. “I like all the unlikeable characters.”

Franco, the maker of the incest drama Daniel and Ana and the nightmarish social-media bullying tragedy After Lucia, is equally appreciative of hard-sell protagonists. In 2020 his gritty, dystopian New Order, in which Mexico’s underclass rises against the 1 per cent, he was heavily criticised for trading in racial stereotypes. “I’ve seen all his films, and New Order, his most controversial film, is definitely my favourite,” says Chastain.

“I like projects that maybe not everyone is comfortable with. I’m a water cooler kind of person. I love something that really creates a discussion. New Order is so shocking. The performances are great. I think it’s so upsetting because it feels like it’s happening. It’s amazing the way he films people as they start coming up over the walls. It’s so slow, and it takes so much time to happen. I think that’s much scarier than someone trying to create an action-thriller sequence.”

[ New Order review: When class warfare goes bad ]

The last time The Irish Times spoke to Chastain she talked about her impoverished childhood in California. “I did grow up with a single mother who worked very hard to put food on our table,” she said about home life in Sacramento. “We did not have money. There were many nights when we had to go to sleep without eating. It was a very difficult upbringing.” She added, “Because of my mother I do always try to think about how something must be for someone else.”

She has, accordingly, crafted a career around championing women, even when, like Tammy Faye Bakker or Tammy Wynette – whom she played in George & Tammy, a portrait of the country star’s tumultuous marriage – those women don’t conform to feminist ideals.

Her path away from that sometimes precarious family life – she also had to contend with the drug addiction and, shortly before Chastain’s acting career took off, death by suicide of her younger sister – came via Shakespeare. When she was 21 she played Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet in the California city of Mountain View; she used a monologue from the play to audition for the Julliard School, in New York, where, thanks to a scholarship funded by Robin Williams (who reportedly saw every film Chastain made before his death, in 2014), she became the first member of her family to go to university.

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When she was 29, Al Pacino cast her as Salomé; she was 37 by the time the film, which Pacino wrote and directed, emerged. By then she had had earned her back-to-back Oscar nominations for The Help and Zero Dark Thirty.

She remains fiercely private about her home life; neither her husband, Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo, nor her children attend red-carpet events. “If I’m at border patrol or getting my passport stamped and somebody recognises me, it’s for Zero Dark Thirty,” she says. “If it’s a cool film-nerd person it’s Interstellar. If it’s just someone on the street who loves movies – but only if I’m wearing make-up that day, because I look different in the movies, you know – it’s Molly’s Game, for sure.”

From early in her career, Chastain has been vocal in her commitment to equal pay, even when that meant saying no to Marvel. Octavia Spencer, her costar from The Help, has spoken about Chastain’s horror at learning that Spencer was earning significantly less than other members of the cast. “I love that woman, because she’s walking the walk and she’s actually talking the talk,” Spencer recalled. “She said, ‘You and I are going to be tied together. We’re going to be favoured nations and we’re going to make the same thing; you are going to make that amount.’ Fast-forward to last week, we’re making five times what we asked for.”

In 2019 Chastain got behind Michelle Williams when it emerged that Mark Wahlberg, Williams’s equally billed costar in All the Money in the World, was paid $1.5 million for reshoots compared with Williams’s paltry $80 a day. (Wahlberg had already received eight times the amount Williams had to sign on to Ridley Scott’s production.) “Jessica’s audience was much wider than mine, and she wasn’t afraid to pick up a megaphone and be heard. And heard she was,” Williams said in a speech in Washington, DC, in which she also noted that Chastain’s wider campaign for equality led to a $2 million donation to the Time’s Up Legal Fund, which supports people who have been sexually harassed at work.

“I read something Taraji said recently,” Chastain says, referring to the Oscar-nominated actor Taraji P Henson. “She started crying during the interview. She was talking about everyone’s assumptions about actors’ salaries. People say, ‘They make $10 million a movie.’ I’ve never made $10 million in my life. That’s crazy. But even when there’s a lot of money, Taraji explained how it works out: 50 per cent goes on tax; 30 per cent of the gross goes to your team. This is not the industry that I think it was in the past. It’s not financially stable – not for me, anyway, and not for my family. It’s not the kind of industry where I can make one film a year and be okay, especially if the films that I’m interested in are Michel Franco films, where the salary is not what most people expect. I work a lot because of that.”

Memory is in cinemas from Friday, February 23rd