Jessica Chastain, the Oscar-winning actress who now plays both the mother and the monster

Jessica Chastain

Photo: Harald Krichel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 24, 1977 Sacramento, California, USA
Occupation	Actress and film producer
Known for	Interstellar, The Martian, The Help
Awards	2 Academy Award · Golden Globe · SAG Award · Drama Desk

In Other Mommy, Jessica Chastain plays a mother named Ursula and also the thing in the house that wears her face, speaks in her voice and wants her daughter for itself. It is a strange assignment for an Oscar winner who spends part of her week in a Harvard classroom, and stranger still that its trailer became an internet event before the film was finished. Her own explanation, given on the red carpet the night before it opened, says more about her career than any trophy does: as a child she rarely saw a woman on screen she looked up to, until she noticed that in horror the women are usually the ones who defeat the monster.

That line is a key to the whole body of work. Chastain has built a career out of women whom institutions misread: an intelligence analyst nobody believed, a lobbyist who wins by being colder than the men around her, a poker operator chased by federal prosecutors, a televangelist the culture had reduced to a smear of mascara, a country singer remembered as a footnote in her husband’s story. Off screen she has spent the same years arguing about pay, about who gets hired behind the camera, and lately about politics, which she now studies formally. The monster in the house is new. The fight with it is not.

She was born in Sacramento, California, on March 24, 1977, to teenage parents who did not stay together, and grew up in a household she has described as financially precarious. Stability came later, through a stepfather who worked as a firefighter. The decisive push came from her grandmother, who took her as a small child to a touring production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. From then on she wanted to act. School mattered less: she has said she skipped so many classes that she did not graduate with her year. She studied drama at Sacramento City College and kept auditioning.

The audition that changed everything was for the Juilliard School in New York. She was accepted and handed a scholarship that she has never stopped talking about, because it was funded by Robin Williams, a Juilliard alumnus she never got to meet. Without it, she has said, she could not have gone. She graduated in 2003, the year her younger sister Juliet died by suicide after years of addiction. Chastain rarely speaks about the loss in detail, and when she does there is nothing performed in it.

The first years after drama school were an actor’s apprenticeship in guest spots on network television, from ER to the Law & Order franchise, and in theatre. The most important of those stage jobs was Salomé opposite Al Pacino in 2006, the start of a friendship that still shapes her working life. She calls him her acting godfather, and he has kept returning to her projects ever since.

Then came the year that turned her from an unknown into the most visible new actress in American film. In 2011 she had six releases, among them Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter opposite Michael Shannon, Ralph Fiennes‘s Coriolanus, Texas Killing Fields and Tate Taylor’s The Help. Several had been shot years earlier and held back, so audiences met half a dozen versions of her almost at once. Her turn as Celia Foote, the outcast housewife in The Help, earned her a first Academy Award nomination.

Kathryn Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty followed, and with it the role that fixed her screen identity: Maya, the CIA analyst who spends a decade tracking Osama bin Laden while her superiors doubt her. It won her the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and a second Oscar nomination, this time in the lead category. When the horror film Mama, in which she played a reluctant guardian, opened at number one in January 2013, Zero Dark Thirty sat right behind it, making her the first performer in fifteen years to lead the two top films at the American box office on the same weekend.

The rest of the decade mixed prestige and genre with unusual ease. She was the grown-up Murph, the daughter left behind on Earth, in Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar; the steely wife of a heating-oil entrepreneur in J. C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year; a murderous aristocrat in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak; and the mission commander in Ridley Scott‘s The Martian. In Miss Sloane she played a Washington lobbyist fighting the gun industry, and in Aaron Sorkin‘s directing debut, Molly’s Game, she was Molly Bloom, the former skier who ran high-stakes poker games for celebrities and was later charged by federal prosecutors. In 2016 she founded the production company Freckle Films, created to promote diversity in film and run largely by women executives.

Horror kept calling her back. In It Chapter Two she played the adult Beverly Marsh, the only woman in the Losers’ Club, returning to Derry to face the clown that had stalked her childhood. It was a worldwide hit and, in hindsight, a rehearsal for the territory she has now returned to as a lead and as a monster.

Not every gamble paid off, and the record is worth stating plainly. Zero Dark Thirty drew sustained criticism for its depiction of torture as part of the hunt for bin Laden, and Chastain defended the film rather than distancing herself from it. Dark Phoenix, in which she played an alien shape-shifter, was savaged by critics and lost money. The 355, the female-led spy ensemble she conceived and produced, came and went from cinemas in early 2022. Dreams, her second film with the Mexican director Michel Franco, divided critics, and the reviews for Other Mommy have been harsh about the film even when they praise her. There is a pattern in the notices: Chastain is regularly described as better than the material, which is a compliment that also hints at how often the material has not been good enough for her.

Her arguments about money are not abstract. In January 2018, at a Sundance panel, Octavia Spencer recounted how Chastain had insisted on tying their salaries together for a holiday comedy they were developing, a favored-nations deal for two women, one Black and one white. Spencer said the pair ended up being paid five times what they had first asked for. The same season she publicly backed Michelle Williams over the pay gap on All the Money in the World. Variety reported in 2025 that Chastain and Spencer would finally reunite on screen, for the first time since The Help, in Deck the Y’alls, a holiday comedy in which Chastain plays a New York baker.

The role that brought the Oscar was one she built herself. After watching the documentary The Eyes of Tammy Faye, she spent close to a decade developing a feature about Tammy Faye Bakker as a producer, convinced that the evangelist mocked for her makeup had been misjudged, not least for the compassion she showed gay men at the height of the AIDS crisis, when most of her fellow broadcasters would not. Under heavy prosthetics and with a reconstructed voice, she played Bakker from bible-college teenager to faded broadcaster. In 2022 she won the Academy Award for Best Actress and the Screen Actors Guild Award for the performance.

Jessica Chastain as Tammy Wynette in George and Tammy 2022 — Jessica Chastain in *George & Tammy* (2022)

She followed it with another woman the record had flattened. In the Showtime miniseries George & Tammy she played the country singer Tammy Wynette opposite Michael Shannon’s George Jones, earning her first Primetime Emmy nomination. In 2023 she went to Broadway in Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-down staging of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Hudson Theatre, sitting on a revolving chair for most of the evening; it won her the Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination. That autumn she took Franco’s Memory, opposite Peter Sarsgaard, to the Venice Film Festival wearing a T-shirt in support of the striking actors’ union, a small gesture that said where she stood. Mothers’ Instinct, a psychological thriller she produced and co-led with Anne Hathaway, followed in 2024.

In 2025 she enrolled in the mid-career Master of Public Administration program at Harvard Kennedy School. She told interviewers she was the first person in her family to go to college, that her favorite class turned out to be quantitative methods, and, on late-night television that September, that the degree had nothing to do with a career in office: “I’m not there to be a politician. I’m there to fight politicians.” The same month she received the 2,819th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with Viola Davis and Al Pacino speaking at the ceremony. She called it “not an end point” but “a mile marker”.

The project closest to that new vocabulary is still waiting. The Savant, an eight-episode Apple TV+ limited series that she stars in and executive produces, casts her as Jodi Goodwin, an undercover investigator who infiltrates online hate groups to stop attacks before they happen; it is based on a 2019 Cosmopolitan article about a real investigator. Apple pulled it three days before its planned premiere in September 2025, in the aftermath of a political assassination in the United States. Chastain said publicly that she and the company were “not aligned” on the decision. A summer 2026 window came and went, and the series is now expected in spring 2027.

Meanwhile Franco’s Dreams, in which she plays a wealthy San Francisco socialite entangled with a young Mexican ballet dancer, played in competition at the Berlinale in February 2025 and reached American cinemas in February 2026. The reviews split, but NPR’s Justin Chang called her “one of our most fearless actors”, which is the reading most of her admirers would sign.

Other Mommy is the bet of the moment. Directed by Rob Savage, produced by James Wan for Blumhouse and Atomic Monster and adapted from Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House, it casts her opposite Jay Duplass as parents whose young daughter is courted by an entity that looks and sounds like her mother; Karen Allen and Dichen Lachman also appear. Universal moved it from May to October 9, 2026. The trailer first ran in cinemas before Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and turned into a meme, with Chastain recalling the texts she got from friends who had gone to see Nolan’s epic. The film took $3.6 million in Thursday previews, while critics were unkind, with fewer than one in five reviews positive on Rotten Tomatoes, although the site’s consensus singles out “a valiant turn from Jessica Chastain as the spectral embodiment of a smothering parent”. It opened the same weekend as Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, and Chastain said it was Sorkin himself who flagged the clash, in an email. “Can we get Zuck in Other Mommy, doing press together?” she joked.

Away from sets she has kept her family largely out of view. She married the Italian fashion executive Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo in 2017 at his family’s estate near Treviso, and the couple have a daughter and a son, both born via surrogacy. She has said that she turns down offers she considers unfairly paid, and the causes she takes up in public tend to arrive with a concrete mechanism attached, whether a salary clause, a production company or, now, a degree.

The calendar ahead is crowded. On November 13, 2026, Netflix releases Shana Feste’s Heartland, in which she plays Misty Jones, a former country star searching Nashville’s underside for her missing niece, opposite John Hawkes and Garrett Hedlund. The Savant should finally arrive in spring 2027. Bernard Rose’s Lear Rex, with Pacino as the king and Chastain as Goneril, is in post-production; Elijah Bynum’s crime thriller My Darling California is shooting; and The Off Weeks, an Apple TV+ limited series directed by Michael Showalter, pairs her with Ben Stiller. For now, though, the question she has posed for most of her career is playing on screens across America in its purest form: a woman, a house, and a monster that has to be beaten.