Assassin, alien villain, televangelist: The many faces of Jessica Chastain

She has big teeth, big hair, big nails and layers of perfectly applied make-up. She speaks in a broad Minnesota accent and wears a near permanent smile. She has almost as many pairs of shoes as Imelda Marcos and loves to dress up. Catch a glimpse of her and you might mistake her for one of the stars of some 1980s soap opera like Dynasty. This is televangelist/singer/celebrity Tammy Faye Bakker, as played by Jessica Chastain in the new biopic, The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

Chastain won a “tribute” award at the Toronto Film Festival last week for what the festival called a “captivating performance that is nothing short of alchemy”. She is now a frontrunner in this year’s Oscar race. Critics and awards voters love it when actors go the extra mile to transform into the character they’re playing. They’re still talking about all those extra pounds Robert De Niro put on, and then took off again, when he both bulked up and dieted to play middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980). They liked it when Christian Bale starved himself to play the insomniac lead in The Machinist (2004). Now, they’re lapping up the stories about the seven hours a day Chastain spent in the make-up trailer to play Tammy Faye at different stages of her life.

Chastain, who produced and initiated The Eyes of Tammy Faye, freely admits that her inspiration was a documentary of the same name made in 2000, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato and narrated by RuPaul. Compare shots of Chastain as the televangelist with scenes from the documentary and you’ll often struggle to distinguish between the real woman and the actor portraying her. The new movie offers the most extreme example of Chastain’s ability to reinvent herself from role to role. This is the first time she has used prosthetics to this extent. However, look through her credits over the last decade and you’ll find someone who rarely plays the same character twice.

As if to underline the point, Chastain is currently also on screen in HBO’s intense marital psychodrama Scenes from a Marriage, inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s celebrated 1973 Swedish TV series about warring spouses and now re-imagined by Hagai Levi (creator of The Affair). Starring opposite Oscar Isaac, she wears little make-up. This is raw and emotionally lacerating storytelling with none of the flamboyance of the Tammy Faye movie.

By way of another complete contrast, Chastain will soon be seen in female-driven action thrillerThe 355, starring alongside Penelope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o and Bingbing Fan. Chastain may be a Juilliard-educated classical actor at home in Ibsen and Strindberg plays, but that didn’t stop her from posing for the cheesiest paparazzi pictures during the Cannes festival in 2018 to drum up distributor interest in the project, which hadn’t then been financed.

Again, as with the Tammy Faye film, Chastain is not only the star of the movie but its lead producer. She conceived the project as a female riposte to films like The Dirty Dozen and The Expendables. It follows women from different intelligence agencies around the world who come together to foil a terrorist plot and stop a third world war in the process.

“There’s a real culture … for these huge ensemble male action movies,” Chastain told British Vogue. “I was at a party with my agent, and I was like, ‘You see all of these movies, but you never see female characters working together.’ There might be a woman working alone, or a woman as a honeypot, where her sexuality is her superpower, but never a group of women functioning as a team.” The 355 was quickly labelled as an action picture for the #MeToo era.

The title comes from the code name for a female agent during the American Revolution, one of the first spies for the United States, working under George Washington in the 1770s and whose real identity remains unknown. Speaking with heavy irony, Chastain told chat show host Seth Meyers that “men have been discriminated against for so long because they had only been known for their skills and their talent and their knowledge and the things that they say, and they were not acknowledged for their sexual desirability”. In her film, she is at last allowing “the guys to get to be eye candy”.

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Chastain has had mixed fortunes when it comes to action films. She recently starred in (and produced) thriller Ava, which received lukewarm reviews. She played professional killer and former drug addict with a troubled past who takes gleeful pleasure in shooting her male victims. “Subject is closed,” she calls in to handler Duke (John Malkovich) whenever she completes a job. It’s low-grade fare but, for Chastain, making it was an act of defiance, a way of saying action movies are not only for men. Alongside Charlize Theron, Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson and Halle Berry, she is at the forefront of a new wave of female-driven thrillers and spy pictures turning traditional genre stereotypes on their head. Such films are also presumably enjoyable light relief from her heavier roles.

One moment, Chastain will be tapping her most anguished inner emotions in a low budget Strindberg adaptation such as Liv Ullmann’s 2014 film version of Miss Julie and the next she might be playing an alien villain in a superhero film like 2019’s Dark Phoenix. She has done horror (Mama, It Chapter Two), sci-fi (The Martian) and serial killer movies (The Good Nurse, due out next year), as well as the type of heavyweight dramas (A Most Violent Year, Miss Sloane) that win awards. She can project a Rita Hayworth-like glamour when the occasion demands it but she seldom, if ever, plays passive characters beholden to the menfolk in her life.

Al Pacino was instrumental in Chastain’s transition from stage to screen acting. In 2006, on a recommendation from his Booby Deerfield co-star Marthe Keller, he cast her as King Herod’s beautiful stepdaughter in his LA stage production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. By then, the Californian, born in 1977, was in her late twenties, still a relative unknown who had done plenty of TV and theatre without breaking through. In Salome, she got to dance the dance of the seven veils. Reviewers weren’t especially generous about her performance. “It is like watching someone practising her Shakira belly-shake in the bathroom,” wrote one British critic. The LA Times was equally condescending, describing her as “a ravishing redhead with a penchant for stomping her foot whenever she wants to communicate wilfulness, [who] turns Salome into a kind of New Testament contestant for America’s Next Top Model”.

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Nonetheless, audiences swarmed to the production, intrigued to see Pacino back on stage, and they noticed Chastain too. “As soon as I met her,” Pacino later told the press, “and saw her, I thought: ‘This is the person to play Salome and I must get her to play it before the world picks up on her – which it has done – and turns her into the next big star.’”

Even then, Chastain had screen presence and a huge range. At the same time she was starring as Salome, she was also seen as the beautiful but frail and meek Fifties mother and wife in Terrence Malick’s Palme D’Or winner, Tree of Life. She could play both ingénues and fiery characters. She was soon to be cast as the tough-as-nails CIA analyst, hunting for Osama Bin Laden in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), for which she was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe. Having spent the first decade of her professional career under the radar, she was suddenly everywhere. She was in six major films released in 2011 and has stayed firmly on the awards radar since then.

In many of Chastain’s best roles, the star’s characters have a steely determination that she clearly shares. They fight ferociously to get what they want, whether it’s Salome demanding the head of John the Baptist or her devious, workaholic lobbyist, taking on the gun industry in Miss Sloane (2016). She doesn’t let anything hold her back. In Molly’s Game (2017) in which she plays a hustler running high stakes poker games for the rich and famous, neither crippling childhood skiing injuries nor the bullying of the FBI put her off her stride.

When Chastain does show vulnerability, it’s all the more affecting because she seems so resilient and self-reliant. In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), she was excellent as the daughter/scientist who is furious that her beloved father, the farmer/Nasa pilot (Matthew McConaughey), has abandoned her to go off into space. Chastain captured perfectly both the character’s rage and her sense of desolation about her missing parent.

“She’s a firecracker,” Southern Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) says of Chastain’s character in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. It’s a description that applies to Chastain herself. Once labelled Hollywood’s “It Girl”, she is now in her mid-forties and in her pomp – a star who produces her own movies and gives the impression she now knows exactly where she is going – and God protect anyone or anything that gets in her way.

‘Scenes from a Marriage’ will be available to watch on Sky Atlantic later this year. ‘The 355’ is due to be released on 7 January. ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ is likely to be released early next year