Jessica Chastain is quickly blowing up on the Hollywood scene.
She played the busty wife outcast in The Help, a loving mother in Tree Of Life and now she’s an Israeli spy in her latest movie, The Debt.
In The Debt, Jessica plays a young Rachel Singer who is responsible for capturing an evil Nazi doctor.
EXCLUSIVE: Jessica Chastain Talks Working With Brad Pitt
The undercover team is made up of Sam Worthington and Marton Csokas. Some sexual tension, guns blasting and espionage work later and each of the three charcters are left to face some tough decisions when they are old and gray.
EXCLUSIVE: Jessica Chastain Talks “The Help”
We caught up with Jessica Chastain to discuss her role in one of the best spy movies to hit theaters in a long time.
GlobalGrind: Jessica you have a lot of physical scenes in this movie, but you do a lot of scenes where you have to use facial expressions and gestures to speak without speaking. Which one is more difficult? Is it doing the physical stuff or is it just trying to portray an emotion without saying anything?
Jessica Chastain: Well, I’m an actor who loves when I’m given the opportunity to try to portray something without dialogue. I love that because it means that I have to be present and I have to be really in the moment. It has to be real. That’s what the circumstances are. Nothing forces me to be absolutely present than when I don’t have dialogue to convey how I feel. But yeah, I guess I would say that the fight scenes were more challenging because in my personal life, I’m not a fighter. I’d never thrown a punch. So I went through four months of Krav Maga and actually learned how to punch someone without hurting my wrist and to be honest, I became a bit of a monster. At home, whenever I would come back from training, all my friends would be like, ‘Come on, come at me. I’ll take you down.’ So, yeah, that would be the most challenging.
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You and Helen Mirren got together and came up with a back story for Rachel. So how is it now having her come to you and just connect with Helen?
Oh my gosh. Well, it’s funny cause when I first met John, I was saying, ‘I’m perfect for this part. I’m great for this. She’s 5’4, I’m 5’4.’ Just everything I was saying to go after the role and then once I found out I was cast, there was the thought of how on earth am I going to share a role with Helen Mirren, who really is like a goddess. She’s a dame and a broad. She’s amazing. So, to hang out with her in the first session I was very intimidated, those first moments where I felt, OK Jessica speak up, don’t be shy. But she has a wonderful air about her like she started in the theater. She’s a theater actress and a film actress, so rehearsal is very important to her and so being able to sit down and work with her on the accent … with Joan Washington, who’s a great dialect coach, we worked on different mannerisms that Rachel might share and the back story. I think it was very important because it created the spine for the character that followed us throughout the film. So, even though I didn’t have scenes with Helen, I still feel like I worked with her.
What is it like having two love interests?
Oh my gosh. If I had two love interests, Sam Worthington and Marton Csokas, thank you John Madden. You know, you always get nervous as an actress when you’re playing a character, whether it’s going to be a romance with an actor it’s like ‘Oh please don’t be a jerk’ and I met them — we had a dinner at John’s house and it’s like ‘Ok, I’m gonna meet everybody’ and the table was situated where I was sitting between the two of them. John is there and Chris is there, everyone’s there kind of watching the situation. Five minutes into the dinner I just thought ‘This is going to be awesome.’ Because not only are they incredibly handsome, of course, funny and smart but — in the film, I find their characters heartbreaking. I love that there is in a sense of the love triangle that you can see really redeeming qualities in both of these men which, you know, sometimes as an audience member and I go see a movie and there’s a love triangle, it’s like ‘What? It’s the jerk.’ The absolute opposite is the other. I really think in the hands of lessor actors or a lessor director, it wouldn’t have turned out this way, but I’ll say I had absolute chemistry with both of those men.
