She escaped a tough childhood to become an Oscar-winning star. Now she’s on a mission to rescue country singer Tammy Wynette from decades of feminist dismissal.

There is a scene in George & Tammy, a new six-part biopic series on the country singer Tammy Wynette, in which Jessica Chastain has to perform on stage before a crowd of young extras. The song is Run, Woman, Run, a standard from 1970 in which Wynette, in customary style, exhorts women to stop being so demanding and knuckle down to life with any man who will have them. Or, as Chastain puts it: “Basically, you’re not going to find someone else, so go back to your man.”

On the day of filming, this presented the 45-year-old actor with a problem. Chastain, who took on the role partly to rescue Wynette from what she saw as decades of unfair feminist dismissal, is drawn to characters with room for ambivalence. But even she had to admit that lyrics such as “Run, woman, run / Go back to him and fix things up the very best you can” were a tough sell for a modern audience. They also offended her, personally. Standing on stage, she felt obliged to issue a quick public health warning before shooting the scene. “I looked out at all these sweet, young faces staring up at me and said, ‘Girls: I do not want you to listen to the lyrics of this song. Please. I love Tammy, but she did not believe this. She was married five times, so do not take any of this as gospel.’”

Chastain and I are in a private members’ club on the 100th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, looking out over Central Park. She is all in pink: pink bomber jacket, pink shirt, pink glasses, her sheet of red hair like a shampoo ad against her paper-white face. Chastain lives in New York with her husband, Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo, an Italian aristocrat who works in fashion, and their two children, a decision she relates to her need for “stimulus. I have a place in the country, too, because I have to break free sometimes. But the museums, the theatre, I take the subway, I –”
“– you take the subway?”
“All the time. I put on a mask. People recognise me sometimes, it’s the red hair, but …” In LA, her life would be “comfortable and cosy”, but as her work “isn’t cosy” – as every project, with the exception of X-Men, demands that she be “awakened in a new way, and find new things inside of me” – New York it is.

Read the full article/interview in our press library.

December 10, 2022   Claudia