vanity fair sept 2012
“I’m the unknown everyone’s already sick of,” Jessica Chastain insists, the self-effacing actress telling Vanity Fair contributing editor Evgenia Peretz about her near-crippling insecurity and sensitivity in September’s issue . Even after starring in six films in the past year, Chastain seems not to grasp the fact that she’s made it big: “I have a feeling that very soon I’m going to fail very, very big. I’m going to try something and everybody’s going to be like, ‘What was she thinking?’” Chastain says to Peretz.
Chastain—named to this year’s International Best-Dressed List for her clean, classic style—freely admits that she cries constantly, often for no real reason. Telling Peretz about crying when a security guard yelled at her for coming in through the wrong entrance at Manhattan’s Crosby Street Hotel earlier that day, she begins to well up again: “Even just talking about it now . . . I really get affected by things.” This is typical of Chastain: at her first red-carpet appearance at Cannes, last year for Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, she says she was plagued with a nagging worry: “Will someone be mean to me?” Because of all the potential for meanness, “I don’t want people to look at me,” Chastain confesses to Peretz, which she acknowledges sounds strange coming from an actress. “I’ve spent my life being embarrassed,” she adds.
But Chastain is the queen of using her self-doubt as fuel. For her upcoming role in the Broadway revival of The Heiress, Chastain has been driving herself crazy thinking about how to nail Catherine Sloper’s character: “I haven’t been this unsure in a long time. I don’t feel like ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to nail this.’ I feel really, really terrified.” But ultimately Chastain understands that the anxiety means something important. She sums up her artistic credo: “Maybe if you’re afraid of it, you should look more into it.
ysl manifesto
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