Ten years ago, during interviews to promote her role as a CIA operative in Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning thriller Zero Dark Thirty, Jessica Chastain was asked by one reporter after another what it was like to play a “masculine” character.

“I get this a lot—when people say that the characters I play aren’t feminine. And it makes me so mad,” recalls the Juilliard-trained actor, who received her second Oscar nomination for the performance.

Chastain has never been the just-sit-and-smile type, so she challenged her interviewers: “So, masculine, to you, means a character who is interested in their career and is not interested in a love life?”

Shaking her head in a Zoom window on a recent weekend, Chastain recalls this being the crucial moment when she realized, “We really need to look at how women are seen and valued.”

Since that press tour, Chastain has deliberated over each project she signs onto, each character she plays, and, in effect, each message she is projecting onto movie screens around the globe.

“Everything I do, I’m like, How am I pushing a conversation forward?” says Chastain during an interview about two such projects: the HBO limited series Scenes From a Marriage and Searchlight Pictures’ forthcoming biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye, both of which premiere in September. 

“I look at filmmaking as a political act…in terms of how am I creating a conversation about gender and about women. I know what it is to grow up as a woman and to live in this world as a woman and what the media says.… And if we keep feeding little girls this fairy tale of happily ever after, and someday your prince is going to come and save you from the world and take care of you for the rest of your life, that’s a load of bull. The reality is, yes, someday you could meet someone wonderful, but be your own prince. Go save yourself.”

Chastain’s answer to those fairy-tale delusions may be Scenes From a Marriage, Hagai Levi’s gender-role-swapped adaptation of the Swedish Ingmar Bergman series. In the American HBO reboot, Chastain plays a successful career woman named Mira who realizes she is in an unfulfilling marriage—to Oscar Isaac’s academic Jonathan—and does something about it, telling Jonathan that she is temporarily leaving their young family. 

“Usually when a woman does something like that in media and storytelling, she’s severely punished and that’s it,” points out Chastain. But with Scenes From a Marriage, “You do see Mira go through something dark, but then she goes through the darkness and you realize, at the end, that she made the right decision for herself.”

Chastain and Isaac act out complicated fits and phases of their morphing marriage—messy relationship moments and dynamics not neat enough for usual movie focus, including how women sometimes shrink themselves at home so as to not intimidate or threaten their partner.

“In college, you’re trying to figure out, okay—I have very strong opinions and I’m passionate about my work. Is this going to make my partner feel less adequate or less successful? I mean, there was a reason why I decided [not to date] actors pretty early on, because I didn’t want to navigate that. And there was a reason why I decided that I wanted a partner who is super confident,” says Chastain, referring to her husband, fashion executive Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo. “I feel the more success that I have, the more he feels like he’s a part of it and he’s successful in his own right.”

While Passi de Preposulo is Chastain’s real-life partner, Isaac has become Chastain’s acting soul mate in the nearly two decades since they met at Juilliard. They’ve regularly seen each other’s stage productions, and eventually costarred as husband and wife in 2014’s A Most Violent Year. Scenes From a Marriage benefits from its stars’ mutual trust and chemistry—the same qualities that made the duo’s recent interaction on a Venice Film Festival red carpet go viral.

“I wish I had words for this but I really do not,” wrote film critic Christina Newland earlier this month in a message that was retweeted more than 25,000 times. About a year earlier, while watching Chastain and Isaac rehearse, Scenes From a Marriage director Hagai Levi had been so similarly enthralled by the pair’s off-camera electricity, and inspired to share it, that he chose to bookend episodes of Scenes From a Marriage with footage of the actors preparing for scenes.

“He watched us in rehearsals and was like, ‘I can’t believe what I’m seeing,’” remembers Chastain. “Because Oscar and I love each other. He’s such a beautiful person and we have such a long history of supporting each other and a very similar way of working. And so [Hagai] said to us one day, ‘I have an idea—I want to break the fourth wall to show Jessica and Oscar, and Mira and Jonathan.’ And we were like, ‘That sounds weird, but we’ll try it.’ And I love it.”

For Chastain, the trickiest part of the project was trying to think of Isaac differently.

“I’ve seen Oscar for 20 years in one way,” says the actor. “So I changed his name on my phone to [his character name] Jonathan, because every time he texted me, it would be a reminder of what we were doing. Somebody had given me this book a long time ago for my husband and I—we never filled it out because it’s kind of cheesy—like, what was your favorite memory of the wedding? So I filled it out from Mira’s point of view, and then I gave it to Oscar and he filled it out from Jonathan’s point of view. So we got to read each other’s answers and create a backstory.” (When Isaac showed the book to his wife, Elvira Lind, he told The New York Times, her response was, ‘You finally found your match—someone that is as big of a nerd as you are.’”)

Backstory was no issue for Chastain’s other big fall project: The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which opens in theaters September 17. Chastain was inspired to make the movie after seeing the 2000 documentary, also titled The Eyes of Tammy Faye, about a decade ago. Watching the film, Chastain was struck by how different Bakker was from the media depictions of her.

“I was like, I have to do this, because I grew up thinking that Tammy Faye was a clown. That’s what the media fed me,’” says Chastain. “Everyone was so concerned with how much mascara she wore rather than what she actually did and what she accomplished. She was punk rock in an evangelical world dominated by these white men. She was ordained, and ministered to love without judgment until she died.”

The years it took to get the project off the ground—eventually with Michael Showalter directing and Andrew Garfield costarring as Bakker’s husband, Jim—meant that Chastain had plenty of time to become an expert on Bakker through thorough research and conversations with Bakker’s children, Tammy Sue and Jay.

In addition to citing Bakker’s favorite colors (“pink and leopard”) and preferred form of exercise (“She’d say, ‘I gotta go to the mall’”), Chastain can also rattle off the impressive career strides Bakker made in an overwhelmingly male-dominated industry.

“She helped build three huge television networks—all of them are [still] going strong except PTL,” marvels Chastain. “She recorded 24 albums. She wrote four books. And her albums and her books—and most people don’t talk about this—all the money went to the church. If she was receiving a salary from the church, it absolutely wasn’t the same amount she would have been receiving had she collected her royalties. She worked constantly, she loved being in front of the camera because she loved connecting to people. She loved meeting strangers and, from watching footage, even when she would go to women’s prisons, she was always hugging them. She always wrapped her arms around someone who felt that they had been thrown away or undeserving of love and she wanted everyone to know that they were worthy of God’s grace.”

Chastain’s performance as Bakker may be her most uncanny transformation yet. In addition to undergoing up to seven-and-a-half hours of makeup and prosthetics a day, the actor worked to capture the televangelist’s Minnesotan twang, sang (which, Chastain clarifies, is far outside her comfort zone), and found the strength to crank herself into Bakker’s upbeat verve.

“If most people operate on a 10, she was like a 15 in terms of her energy, and in terms of what she put out there and how much space she was happy to take up in the world. I love her fearlessness in terms of her makeup and her clothes and her voice and the way she sang. Everything was loud.”

Chastain is hopeful that The Eyes of Tammy Faye might start conversations. Tammy Faye Bakker might be the cosmetic opposite of Chastain’s Zero Dark Thirty character—although what does that mean, exactly?

“I hope the movie inspires people to stop judging and dictating and thinking about how a woman presents herself in the world, whether or not she’s wearing too much makeup or not enough makeup or pantsuits or skirts. It’s no one’s business how a person presents themselves in the world—it’s how they feel beautiful, and that’s enough. And I hope it does inspire people to think, if you give love and forgiveness, that’s what you receive.”

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is the latest Hollywood project to reexamine the media’s mistreatment of various women through the ’90s and ’00s, following films, documentaries, and TV series focused on Britney Spears, Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbitt, and Marcia Clark. But in Chastain’s mind, these projects are not nearly enough. “It’s good to be living through this [time of reevaluation], but how wonderful also will it be when we don’t have to do it anymore?” points out Chastain. “When history books will actually write about women?”

There was a point in Chastain’s career when she worried that her opinions might ostracize her from Hollywood—a legitimate fear, given the industry’s long history of labeling outspoken women “difficult.” But her friends reassured her—“in the way that only good girlfriends can do,” Chastain told The New York Times—to keep speaking up. “They helped me eliminate fear and understand that the only way to change something that’s wrong is to change it, not ignore it.”

A publicist signals that interview time has run out, but Chastain has more to say—not just about her role, but reminding me of mine.

“I think about this all the time—what I grew up watching and the parts I have seared in my memory, and what little girls are watching now and what is affecting them,” says Chastain. “Media is so important. We don’t know it, but we’re putting seeds and sending subliminal messages without even knowing it. We’re shaping lives and consciousness and self-esteem and someone’s power and strengths. So what you write about girls and women, and how you write about them, that matters. That inspires little girls without them knowing it. It’s a big responsibility that the media has, and a big responsibility I have. And I’m so excited that we’re living in a time where we’re all examining that.”

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