Jessica Chastain Is A Nasty Woman & Proud Of It
Nice story.
Jessica Chastain Is A Nasty Woman & Proud Of It
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By Rachel Simon
10 days ago
It might feel like ancient history now, but it was only a little over a month ago that Donald Trump took the stage at the third presidential debate, glanced over at Hillary Clinton, and muttered the statement that'd come to define the tail end of the 2016 election: "Such a nasty woman." In the weeks since the phrase was uttered, it's become (and remained) nothing short of a battle cry for Clinton supporters, women who've taken the derogatory connotations behind the words and turned them into points of pride, markers of ambition, preparation, and drive. Still, not everyone is on-board with the repurposed phrase; as the results of the election sadly showed, America would still prefer an ill-equipped man than a nasty woman in the country's highest office. But for the actor Jessica Chastain, an avid Clinton supporter and self-proclaimed feminist, the candidate's loss doesn't mean that the message shared by her supporters has to be lost, too.
"I’m a nasty woman. I’m proud to be a nasty woman," Chastain tells me, the morning after she arrived at her New York home for a quick Thanksgiving celebration. "It’s a strange thing to say, but I’m not going to let someone make me feel bad for succeeding and using my power."
In the time since Trump's win, countless people have looked back at the election and wondered if things could've been different. Would Clinton have won if she were less zealous, less fierce, less herself? It's hard to say, but Chastain — whose new film, Miss Sloane, features a protagonist who's every bit as "nasty" as Clinton and the star herself — has no patience for those who choose to see those qualities as flaws.
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....................When Chastain first signed on to Miss Sloane, it was the film's controversial subject matter — the plot hinges around Elizabeth's fight to get a strict gun control bill passed into law — that caught her attention. But soon, she says, she was drawn to its reversal of the gender politics so commonplace in pop culture.
"Usually in film, when you see a female lead character who’s championing something, it’s something that has to do with being female," Chastain explains. "It’s inherently a female movie, a female issue." But with Miss Sloane, she says, "I was really excited to see a successful female working in politics that was championing an issue that wasn’t gender specific."...........................