Despite the close attention it’s paid on the red carpet, fashion, for a celebrity, is typically fairly disconnected from a star’s real interior world. For the chameleonic actor Jessica Chastain, though, fashion is elemental: a true pleasure that is both a vehicle for self-expression and an opportunity for inward expansion. Fashion is like music, she says one morning this summer. It’s an art that doubles as a tool she can use. “It constantly makes me feel different things,” she says. “It opens up other parts of myself.” It’s this perspective—along with the kind of exquisite bone structure that belongs as much in Old Hollywood as it does new—that made Chastain the natural choice to pose in decades-spanning designs for the Centennial Issue of L’OFFICIEL.
Anniversaries were on her mind, too, when Chastain spoke to the magazine. It was a few days after she’d returned from Cannes, a full 10 years after her debut there with Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. “My career in cinema is a decade old now, which is shocking,” she says, though that’s really only true in the sense that she’s managed to build one so rich and interesting in such a relatively short period of time. If you need an idea of the actor’s range, consider the two projects she has premiering this month: Michael Showalter’s biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye, in which Chastain transformed into the emotive, scandal-plagued evangelist, and Hagai Levi’s present-day reprise of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 two-hander Scenes from a Marriage for HBO, in which the roles of the husband and wife have been flipped.
