Jessica Chastain

Jessica Chastain (born March 24, 1977, Sacramento, California, U.S.) is an American actress who is known for her versatile performances across multiple genres. A recipient of an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, Chastain is especially noted for playing flawed but strong women characters.

Early life

Chastain was born to teen parents and raised by her mother, a vegan chef, and, later, her stepfather, a firefighter. She became interested in acting as a child after her grandmother took her to see a play. She struggled in high school, but in 1998 she graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. That year she made her professional debut in a stage production of Romeo and Juliet in Mountain View, California. She then moved to New York City to enroll in the Juilliard School (B.F.A., 2003), after which she relocated to Los Angeles to pursue a film career.

Film debut, breakthrough, and rise to prominence

For several years Chastain alternated guest appearances in television shows with stage work. Notably, she starred with Al Pacino in a Los Angeles production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (2006). In 2008 she made her film debut, cast in the title role of Jolene. The following year she played Desdemona in an Off-Broadway production of Othello. She shared a role with Helen Mirren in the thriller The Debt (2010), about Mossad agents haunted by their past. Chastain’s true breakthrough came in 2011, when she appeared in several movies, most notably Terrence Malick’s meditation The Tree of Life and the blockbuster The Help. In the latter, Chastain portrayed an ostracized housewife who hires an African American cook (Octavia Spencer) to fool Chastain’s husband into thinking that she knows how to cook and do housework. For her performance, Chastain earned an Academy Award nomination for best actress in a supporting role.

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Chastain’s credits in 2012 included Lawless, about Depression-era bootleggers in rural Virginia, and Kathryn Bigelow’s thriller Zero Dark Thirty, in which the actress played a CIA analyst who helps find Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the September 11 attacks; for her work in the latter, she won a Golden Globe for best performance by an actress in a motion picture (drama) and garnered another Oscar nomination for best actress in a leading role. Chastain continued to show her range, starring in the horror film Mama (2013) and taking on a variety of roles in 2014, including in Liv Ullmann’s Miss Julie, from the August Strindberg play; the gangster movie A Most Violent Year; and Christopher Nolan’s powerful science-fiction drama Interstellar .

Chastain next played the head of a mission to Mars that is forced to abandon one crew member (Matt Damon) on the planet in The Martian (2015). In 2016 she was cast as the wife of the title character (Chris Hemsworth) in the fairy-tale-based The Huntsman: Winter’s War and won praise for her portrayal of a driven and powerful lobbyist in Miss Sloane. She chose to work with female directors for her next two movies—Niki Caro’s The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017), in which a Warsaw couple uses a zoo to help Jews escape Nazis during World War II, and Woman Walks Ahead (2017), Susanna White’s biopic about a white woman who became involved in the Lakota struggle for land rights in the late 19th century.

Later career

In 2019 Chastain appeared in the franchise film X-Men: Dark Phoenix and the horror movie It Chapter Two. She starred in the crime drama Ava in 2020. The following year she and Oscar Isaac portrayed a couple whose relationship is falling apart in the TV miniseries Scenes from a Marriage, a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 series. Also in 2021 she appeared as the title character in the biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye, about Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, married televangelists who were brought down by scandal. For her performance, Chastain earned her first Oscar, for best actress.

In the espionage thriller The 355 (2022), she was part of an all-star cast that included Lupita Nyong’o and Penélope Cruz. That same year Chastain took on the role of country music legend Tammy Wynette in George & Tammy, a Showtime miniseries about the singer’s rocky romance with George Jones (played by Michael Shannon). Chastain performed her own vocals and was nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding lead actress in a limited series. She was also cast in the crime thriller The Good Nurse in 2022. Chastain also appeared in the psychological thriller Mothers’ Instinct (2024) and the drama Dreams (2025).

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