Honor Roll is a daily series running throughout December that features new or previously published interviews, profiles and first-person stories of some of the year’s most notable cinematic voices. Today, we’re running a new interview with Jessica Chastain, who was recently nominated for both a SAG award and a Golden Globe for her blistering performance in “Zero Dark Thirty.”

After netting an Academy Award nomination for her supporting turn in “The Help” and garnering a slew of praise for performances in films as varied as “Take Shelter,” “The Tree of Life” and “Lawless,” you’d be forgiven for forgetting that 35-year-old Jessica Chastain only rose to prominence early last year. After her astonishing 2011, during which she appeared in a whopping seven features, Chastain is back in select theaters Wednesday, Dec. 19, in her most high-profile role and project to date: as Maya, a CIA agent at the forefront of the manhunt to track down Osama bin Laden in Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s riveting follow-up to “The Hurt Locker,” “Zero Dark Thirty.”

On a rare day off from performing on Broadway in the current acclaimed revival of “The Heiress,” Chastain sat down with Indiewire in a posh suite at the Ritz Carlton overlooking Central Park to discuss playing a character based on a real-life person, working with Bigelow, keeping her role a secret up until now and what scared her most about the controversial project.

What were your first impressions when you came across Mark Boal’s dense script?

When I read the script a year ago, I thought, “This is one of the best scripts I have ever read. This is ‘All The President’s Men!’” All the movies that I loved, the kind of filmmaking I loved from the 1970s — that is what this is. And this is a real woman, and it’s not fiction, and it’s incredible. It’s so current, and it holds a mirror up to our society. But then I had to keep it a secret for a year. People just saw it a week ago.

So many were trying to guess whether the film would take a political stand on the war and who exactly you play. No one knew you were the lead of the film until a couple weeks ago – what’s it been like, keeping that secret?

It’s hard. I’ve been working for a long time. I’ve wanted to be an actor since I was seven years old. I didn’t go the fast route — I went and I trained, I did theater, I did a lot of guest spots on TV; I’ve really worked my way up. When I got this part, it was a rite of passage. It’s amazing to play a lead character in a Kathryn Bigelow film. And to not really be able to celebrate that moment was really difficult for me – my agents couldn’t even read the script.

I knew, however, because of the importance of what the film was, I absolutely had to keep it a secret. But I’ll tell you right now, nothing made me madder than when I’d hear things like… It’d be announced that I’d joined the film, and everyone was trying to make me joining the film as unimportant as possible; they would mix me with other people, “Oh, also, Jessica Chastain is joining the cast.” People were speculating that I was playing Joel Edgerton’s wife! When I was reading stuff like that, I was like, “You have got to be kidding me.” When all I want to say is, “I’m not the wife! I’m not barefoot and pregnant while the husband goes off and does the important work! I’m actually the woman who is a true hero in this story.”

– Read the full interview at Indiewire

December 18, 2012   Luciana