Jessica Chastain is so much more than one of the most talented actresses of our time.
When she’s not starring in three to five movies a year on a regular basis, she’s busy advocating for the rights of actors everywhere as the Hollywood strike’s de facto spokesperson. When she’s not flexing her muscles as a producer and investor, she’s headlining Broadway plays, resurrecting classic female protagonists like Catherine in The Heiress and Nora in A Doll’s House. And when she’s actually done working for the day, she somehow carves out time to be a wife, mother, and actual human being.
In a word, Chastain is a powerhouse ⏤ an artist and trailblazer who is never satisfied with Hollywood’s status quo and is constantly working to effect positive change for her fellow female creators. Her production company Freckle Films has created more opportunities for women to tell female-driven stories in a male-dominated industry, and in her spare time, she takes meetings with foreign presidents in the midst of international wars.
What does an Oscar-winning actress who has already accomplished everything do next?
Is it time for Jessica Chastain to revive her character from The Help?
In August of 2023, Chastain revealed that she was eager to explore what happens next with her character from The Help, a film and performance that earned her her first Oscar nomination and made her a household name overnight. That character, of course, is Celia Foote, the bubbly blonde housewife who welcomes a housekeeper — Octavia Spencer’s Minny — into her home with open arms (unlike Minny’s previous employer). It is, in my opinion, the best performance of Chastain’s already storied career, but does that make it a role worth returning to?
Many of Chastain’s characters over the years ⏤ from Maya in Zero Dark Thirty and Molly Bloom in Molly’s Game to Mira in Scenes From a Marriage ⏤ have been contemporary women navigating high-stakes situations, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, over time I’ve come to wonder whether some of these roles have been challenging enough for someone of Chastain’s caliber. They were all women worth playing and stories worth telling, to be sure, but for an actress with an emotional range that rivals Meryl Streep’s, it might be time for Chastain to return to the past in order to move into the next phase of her career.
The roles I personally believe are her very best find her disappearing so completely into character that you soon forget you’re watching Jessica Chastain. Consider her Oscar-winning performance in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Chastain fully inhabited the title character — who, yes, was a real-life woman, but one so iconic that it required extraordinary physical and emotional demands to play her. To bring Tammy Faye Bakker to accurate life, Chastain needed to adopt her goofy voice, don outrageous costumes and makeup, and cry on a dime anytime the moment called for it. The role was a far cry from many of her less cartoonish performances (see the title assassin in Ava, the troubled Amy in The Good Nurse, the stoic alien in Dark Phoenix) ⏤ except for one.
Celia Foote was a similarly splashy role, and even though she was more of a supporting character than Tammy Faye’s protagonist, her Marilyn Monroe-esque nature and wide emotional range required a demanding level of commitment from Chastain. The end result is a delight to behold: Chastain’s Celia is progressive but flawed, a wannabe cook desperate to have a baby and fit in with the other socialites, but who occasionally gets drunk and vomits in front of them at formal occasions. Celia is starkly different from Chastain, and yet includes all the best parts of her, not to mention darker shades that a lesser actress might not have felt as comfortable exploring.
Celia Foote, Tammy Faye, Anna Morales in A Most Violent Year ⏤ these women are so different from each other and yet so fully realized that it feels like they’re played by completely different actresses. In embodying them so seamlessly, Chastain has proven that she can adopt diverse voices, personalities, worldviews, and head-to-toe transformations any and every time. Not every actor possesses this ability, which is why not everyone should return to previous roles they’ve played in an attempt to recapture lightning in a bottle. Chastain can, which is exactly why she should.
Stepping back into the role that launched her career and continuing to mine Celia for gold would not only allow Chastain to return to a character she’s already played ⏤ something she has yet to do in her career ⏤ but it would encourage her to get back to her chameleonic character-part strengths. This disappearing act has become her calling card, after all, and a return to her roots could serve as a springboard for other similar character transformations ⏤ a creative investment that I believe would pay dividends come future award seasons.
Now look, I’m biased here. I’ve been following Chastain’s career since 2011, when her work in The Help differed so vastly from her The Tree of Life that I had no idea it was the same actress in both roles. Celia has gone on to become my favorite performance of all time, and having met and spoken with Chastain on several occasions, I can confirm that she’s as generous on stage and screen as she is in person. I’ll follow her to the ends of the earth, whether she’s playing a chicken-shaking socialite or a sobbing televangelist, but to see her revive Celia and then take on more character parts like her and Tammy Faye? Kindly catch me while I fall over backwards.
Continuing to pursue the character-part route is how she can keep things fresh for herself as an actress, win Oscars two, three, and four, and continue showing audiences why she’s among the most versatile and talented actors of our time. With any luck, it will also prove to Hollywood ⏤ and men everywhere ⏤ what can happen when you give a woman the seat at the table she deserves.
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