Not an overnight star

Steady growth

“They’ll say, ‘Save it, save it,’ ” said Chastain, who takes a certain pride in her active ducts. “I tell them: ‘Don’t worry. I have a bottomless well of tears.’ ”

Being a world-class weeper is not her only gift. This summer, she has exuded ethereal earth mother vibes in The Tree of Life, and has gotten laughs as a touchingly exuberant Southern sexpot in the period drama, The Help. In Take Shelter, Michael Shannon may have the showier role as a man in the process of mentally unravelling, but it is Chastain’s performance as his supportive wife that’s the beating heart of that psychological thriller.

In Texas Killing Fields, moviegoers will discover Chastain’s version of a perp-slapping small-town cop. Later in the year, she’ll appear as loyal Virgilia in Ralph Fiennes’s reworking of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

Jessica Chastain has worked on another film, The Debt, directed by John Madden. That drama-thriller tells the timeline-jumping story of three Mossad agents — played by Chastain, Sam Worthington and Marton Csokas — on the trail of a Nazi war criminal in the mid-1960s, and the repercussions of their mission 30 years later. In preparation for the role, Chastain read mountains of material on the Holocaust, trained in the elbow-flinging Israel martial art of Krav Maga, and pored over YouTube videos of a young Helen Mirren — who plays her character in 1997 — to memorise Mirren’s smallest facial tics and vocal inflections. When they first met to figure out ways to sync up their performances, Mirren immediately noticed that there was something she and Chastain already shared.

“I recognised my younger self in her in the sense of the seriousness and dedication with which she approaches the part,” Mirren said. “She’s dogged.”

Sam Worthington, who plays her introverted Mossad colleague, took his admiration a step further and helped engineer a screen reunion between them in director Ami Canaan Mann’s Texas Killing Fields. (This time, Worthington plays Chastain’s troubled ex-husband, also a cop.) “I told Ami Mann: ‘Get this girl. Trust me. She’s sweet and soft, but she’s a chameleon,’ ” Worthington said.

Though Chastain (who doesn’t give out her age) seems to have burst all of a sudden onto the big screen, for the past four years or so she was becoming something of a trending topic in Hollywood. It started with Al Pacino, who cast her as the sulky princess in his as-yet-unreleased film Wilde Salome, based on a stage production that she had also starred in, and praised her to Terrence Malick, who cast her in The Tree of Life. Then Malick — who has hired Chastain for his next film, tentatively titled The Burial — spread the word to Steven Spielberg, whose company, DreamWorks, made The Help; to Jeff Nichols, the writer-director of Take Shelter; and to John Hillcoat, who put Chastain in his Prohibition-era gangster movie, The Wettest County in the World, due next year.

“Sometimes I’ll have a meeting with someone and they’ll say, ‘Oh, Sean Penn was just here and was saying the nicest things about you,’ ” said Chastain, referring to her Tree of Life co-star. “You know when you’re applying for a job?” she said. “These are like my recommendations. It’s nice.”

When the red-haired, pale-skinned Chastain said this, she was sitting in the empty dining room of a restaurant, taking a few tentative bites from a plate of watercress, raw artichoke and fava beans. “This is a very strange salad, I find; why is it so spicy?” she said, then quietly asked the waitress for a less exotic combination of romaine lettuce and sliced tomatoes.

At moments like these, it’s easy to see that her career trajectory, whizzing from unknown-ish actress with six completed movies waiting for release to Next Big Thing, means that almost every day holds something brand new for her. In May, for example, it was dealing with the otherworldly red carpet hoopla at the Cannes Film Festival when The Tree of Life had its world premiere. “If you watch it,” said Chastain, referring to footage of her standing sandwiched between her co-stars, Sean Penn and Brad Pitt, each grasping a hand of hers tightly as they posed for a wall of shouting paparazzi at the Palais des Festivals, “you can actually see them whispering in my ear. They’re going, like, ‘OK, and now we’re going to turn around.’ ”

Born and raised in a Northern California suburb, Chastain is one of five children and describes her family as tightknit, middle-class and “really average.” (Her father is a firefighter; she dreams of someday buying her mother, a vegan chef, her own food truck.) If Chastain has anyone to thank for her interest in the dramatic arts, it’s her grandmother, who took her at age 7 to see a production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s crowd-pleasing musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

After high school, with years of plays under her belt, she moved on to the Juilliard School of Drama in New York. She can still remember her parents’ reaction when her acceptance letter arrived, making her the first in her family to attend college. In her final year at Juilliard, she was spotted in an acting showcase and instantly signed to a 12-month holding deal by producer John Wells (E.R., The West Wing). “In auditions, lots of people try to grab your attention,” Wells said. “But Jessica has this ability to be quite still. You’re always watching what she’s doing.” There followed a post-college education of sorts: a touring theatre production with Philip Seymour Hoffman, guest stints on Veronica Mars and Law & Order: Trial by Jury. Then films beckoned.

If there is one kind of watching that Chastain is on the fence about, it involves strangers who realise they’ve seen her in a movie. “I don’t want it to get in the way of me disappearing into my roles,” said the actress, who in a few weeks will start work on Mamá, a Guillermo Del Toro-produced horror film in which she plays a tattooed, child-hating bass player.

“And I get embarrassed really, really easily,” she added. “I get embarrassed even when people sing me ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”