The 'Perverse Pleasures' Of Her Latest Role

Since arriving on cinema screens in 2008, Jessica Chastain has created a gallery of strong, often cold female characters whose steely countenances uncover deep reservoirs of conflicting and resonant emotions. In A Most Violent Year, the third film from rising director JC Chandor (Margin Call, All Is Lost), Chastain stars as Anna Morales, the faithful wife to burgeoning immigrant businessman Abel (Oscar Isaac) who struggles with his abhorrence of the violence in the increasingly corrupt backdrop of 1980s New York. “Anna is very much a woman living in a man’s world and she has in a way played a role, that of the wife,” Chastain says. “But in reality she is Dick Cheney to Abel’s George Bush; she is doing things behind the scenes that no one is aware of, but she is colder, more of a serpent, who will hide her cards.”

"In reality she is Dick Cheney to Abel’s George Bush."

The dichotomy between Abel and Anna is the centrifugal force in this morality tale. While their roles seem relatively clear-cut – Abel the knight of moral fortitude, Anna the scheming Lady Macbeth – it is clear through myriad nuances of conversational tone and surreptitious action that they are more codependent than is shown on the surface. Chastain maintains that it is this that makes the Morales the perfect power couple. “Anna absolutely loves her husband and would do anything for him, but at the same time she feels his actions are putting their family in direct danger. The interesting thing about her that makes me laugh is that her man is her king, she loves being his wife and the idea of being the wife, but in the next instant will totally emasculate him. It’s this mixture of wanting power and love – no matter how much they fight and she knocks him down, he is her everything. And she gets a perverse pleasure when Abel shows he will do what it takes. You know those girls who walk down the street, and cheer her boyfriend on when they get in a fight? That’s her."

The incongruous yet incisive worlds that Chandor creates in his films are something that Chastain immediately identifies with, as most of her career choices thus far have revolved around what has fascinated her and pushed her to think and act beyond what she deemed possible. “I think [Chandor] illuminates capitalism as something we don’t really talk about. I see Abel as a metaphor for the United States in search of the American dream. Can he maintain his morals in a corrupt industry and still find success? I think this is a film that occurs before Gordon Gekko says that greed is good; you have A Most Violent Year, you have Wall Street, and then you have the banking crisis. For me, this isn’t a secret. I work with great directors. If you work with an artist who is really good and challenges you it makes you a better actor, and your performances are going to be amazing because all you have to do is show up and react to what they are doing. Being able to say what you are feeling is such a relief and opens things right up. But you have to be there for that to happen.”