Jessica Chastain Time Travels on Broadway for The Heiress

“As an actor, you approach the characters from what the script tells you. You don’t think about, Well, what do I look like compared to what she looks like?� says Jessica Chastain of preparing to play the title character in her first Broadway production, The Heiress, a 1947 play based on Henry James’s Washington Square, now being revived at the Walter Kerr Theater. Nevertheless, Chastain’s process involved a physical transformation that began during the first week of rehearsals when she “kind of tortured� the costume crew into providing her with period clothing and a wig—and later came a nose prosthetic. “I’m a jeans girl, but a blue-jeans way of moving is very different from wearing petticoats, so from day one, I was wearing the shoes, the skirt, the corset. I never really left the rehearsal room.� Chastain laughs. “It took so long to put everything on every day, it’s like, Well, I’ll just bring my lunch and eat it here.�

Chastain plays Catherine Sloper, a young woman self-sequestered in a townhouse off Washington Square in the 1850s. Plain and shy, Catherine so vastly fails to live up to her prominent father’s expectations that when a handsome gentleman comes calling (Dan Stevens, who perfected the lovelorn type as Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey), her father (David Strathairn) convinces her that such a suitor could only be after her inheritance. “If Catherine was born nowadays, she could get some [beauty] products,� says Chastain. “It would be fine.�

The last time Chastain performed onstage—as Desdemona opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Iago at the Public in 2009—she had yet to become a marquee name. Then, in 2011, she starred in seven films, earning an Oscar nomination for her role in The Help; this year brings four, including a role in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, coming out in December. But for the moment, Chastain is wholly focused on the nineteenth century.

“She does things completely,� says Heiress director Moisés Kaufman. “In rehearsal, we would take a break and she would be embroidering because her character embroiders.� He and Chastain visited the Merchant’s House, built in 1832, and “worked with someone who taught us when you curtsy, how to hold a handkerchief, how to hold a fan, what happens when a gentleman calls,� Chastain says. “You would never run up the stairs. You were never supposed to hold your skirt with two hands.�

Chastain, who still gets stage fright before curtain, has developed a few rituals of her own: “Every night I whisper to myself, ‘You chose this, Jessica. You chose this. This is what you wanted to do your whole life.’�     

*This article originally appeared in the October 22, 2012 issue of New York Magazine.