Hollywood actress Jessica Chastain has revealed how she prepared for her role in the new Kathryn Bigelow movie Zero Dark Thirty. Jessica plays a CIA agent in the film and says that she did a lot of research and a lot of reading to get into the mindset of her character.
Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty
Chastain told Collider, “I had three months before we started shooting. I went to school for it, I guess. I nicknamed Mark “the professor.” I would sit with him and go through the screenplay and ask a lot of questions about the character I was playing and about the CIA. I did some reading. I found two books that were particularly helpful, The Looming Tower (The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright) and Michael Scheuer’s book, Osama bin Laden.”
She added, “I was never able to meet the real woman it’s based on because she’s an undercover agent. I had to use my imagination to fill in the blanks where the research couldn’t answer the questions. So, instead of going ‘OK…Jessica Chastain as CIA agent, this is what I would do,’ I tried to answer why she was recruited out of school.”
Jessica Chastain as her Zero Dark Thirty character
Jessica continued, “There’s a child’s drawing in Pakistan, American candy, certain things that would be reminders of the life that she was becoming a stranger to. I had to create on my own, but still stay faithful to the woman I’m portraying.”
Zero Dark Thirty is set to be released in the US on January 11, 2013 before then being released in the UK on January 25, 2013.
Zero Dark Thirty trailer
