Jessica Chastain opened up about her troubled childhood and how acting helped her get by.
didn't have the easiest time growing up, but she says without that fraught home life she also would have never discovered her deep love of acting.The Guardian
, the actor opened up about her own struggles as a young woman, dropping out of high school, and how she found an outlet through acting. Chastain said that while most dropouts would just hang around “smoking or sleeping in,” she would sit in her car reading Shakespeare. She explained, “I was in high school, and there was a trip to the Oregon Shakespeare festival and I sawplay Richard III. And…something opened up inside me. It was the strangest thing, that I could be so moved.
The Oscar winner continued, “I became obsessed with Shakespeare. My grandma had just bought these ornamental books—she liked design, and these books weren’t meant to be read. They just sat on the shelf to look good. And one was the complete works of Shakespeare. I still have it. To me it’s very sentimental.” Chastain added that “it was something about the rhythm and how it fed into the emotion” that drew her in to those plays.
When asked what she thinks it is about finding Shakespeare in that particular moment that meant so much to her, Chastain teared up as she replied, “It felt like someone understood me in a different way. I can get emotional talking about it. It’s like a...It’s like you’re not being seen. Then all of a sudden, someone who was alive years ago sees you.” Being seen at that age was particularly impactful for the actor as she said the focus was decidedly not on her within her own family.
She added that part of the reason why no one stopped her is that her younger sister, Juliet, “was having a lot of difficulties, and everyone was very stressed. So the focus was on that. When I didn’t graduate, no one even noticed. It wasn’t even a conversation of, ‘Uh, are we going to your graduation?’ Nothing.” In a 2014 interview withChastain had previously shared that her sibling struggled with drug addiction and depression for years before ultimately taking her own life in 2003.
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