Jessica Chastain on Miss Sloane role: 'She shatters any kind of gender stereotype'

The Hollywood star plays a cutthroat Washington lobbyist in her new film 
EuropaCorp
Rosamund Urwin9 May 2017
The Weekender

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After a London screening of her new film Miss Sloane, Jessica Chastain recalls the contrasting reactions of a woman and a man in the audience.

“The woman said, ‘I don’t have a question — I just want to thank you for creating this role [of Elizabeth Sloane]. I feel inspired and can’t wait to get back to work’,” Chastain says.

“And then the man stood up and said, ‘I wasn’t going to ask anything, but isn’t she a sociopath?’ It was fascinating to see these two different reactions to a character that we as an audience are used to men playing and not questioning the character’s motives.”

In Miss Sloane, released on Friday, Chastain plays a successful Washington DC lobbyist who takes on the gun lobby.

She’s ruthless. Manipulative. Tunnel-visioned about her goals. Brilliant. She works 16 hours a day and doesn’t sleep. She shuns intimacy, preferring transactional sex.

Her own lawyer dubs her “the poster child for the most morally bankrupt profession since faith-healing” and the driving instructor who failed her at 16 told her she was reckless — “I knew then and there that I had a career in politics,” says Sloane.

We have seen elements of this character before on screen. Gordon Gekko. Leo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort. Frank Underwood in House of Cards. Pete Campbell in Mad Men. They are, of course, all men.

We’re not used to female characters like this. The closest we have is Claire Underwood (still the more relatable half of that marriage) and Olivia Pope in Scandal, both of whom still have their humanising moments.

Claire, at the start of House of Cards, was Lady Macbeth, egging on her Machiavellian husband (and choosing to overlook his methods).

But by series five, which lands on Netflix at the end of the month, she is seeking power for herself, running for Vice-President alongside (not behind) Frank.

This shift — from the power behind the throne to the king-maker — reflects a growing appetite for commanding and cold women on screen.

When I watched Miss Sloane I kept expecting a back-story that explained her drive. A dead sibling, say. Spoiler alert: it never comes.

Sloane is simply a woman who loves to win (Chastain considers it an addiction: “the bigger the win, the bigger the high”).

She is even willing to betray Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s character, gun-violence-survivor-turned-activist Esme Manucharian, forcing her to tell all on TV. “We’re used to women having to apologise for any flaw they have — and Elizabeth Sloane doesn’t,” says Chastain.

In fact, director John Madden says that when he received the script there was an explanation of her behaviour. “I said, ‘This has to go’. It was a prop, one the writer didn’t want.

"He was persuaded by his manager that she had to be relatable, but relatability is about letting us understand what makes someone tick as a human being. This is a woman who has erased every aspect of herself other than the armature she needs to do her job, at tremendous personal cost. She doesn’t even appear to be a human being at the beginning — she’s a machine.”

Everything about her is weaponised — even her wardrobe. There’s a moment in the film when you see her clothes hanging up — and it’s all clean lines and monochrome.

Her look isn’t about fashion but presentation. Her clothes are armour, whether it’s a black Saint Laurent suit and a white pussy-bow blouse for the office, or a navy Oscar de la Renta gown that Sloane wears at a charity benefit where she pulls the political strings.

And there’s always a perfect red pout and spike heels. “It’s not sexualised,” says Chastain of Sloane’s look. “There’s no cleavage. She’s not there being demure and submissive. She’s dressed powerfully and aggressively.”

She influenced Sloane’s look herself. “I went to DC and met about a dozen female lobbyists and the majority had black nail polish,” she recalls.

“It’s predominantly men in the industry and it’s still a put-together look, but it’s aggressive. It’s not soft and delicate.” She says she based the look on these women, as well as her LA agent “who dresses like a superhero. She walks into a room and you feel intimidated just by what she’s wearing. And I loved that for Elizabeth.”

As a viewer, I came away both wanting to be Sloane (professional, powerful, not caring what other people think) and feeling appalled by her.

“Elizabeth is the smartest person in the room,” agrees Chastain. “She shatters any kind of gender stereotype. She works in an industry dominated by men, and she uses her intelligence, her power, and her skill at her job to intimidate.

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"For a lot of women, that’s exciting to see. We live in a world where women like that aren’t celebrated, with the idea that being ambitious is a bad thing to be — you don’t want to be a try-hard. I want to shatter that to pieces.”

Even though we now have a smattering of female world leaders — Angela Merkel, Theresa May and almost Hillary Clinton — we still don’t have many models of female power.

Both Merkel and May seem restrained. Part of the appeal of Miss Sloane is she often feels dangerously out-of-control.

When I ask Chastain if the world still has a problem with powerful women, she laughs at the obviousness of the answer.

“An enormous one. Girls are born thinking that they can do anything or be anything they want to be, and then society teaches them otherwise. I want to keep putting out images so women can go ‘I’m alright to be authentically me’.”

A Harvard study found when men seek power they are seen as more impressive; when a woman does, she’s met with anger or disgust. The pursuit of power or enjoyment of holding it is seen as unfeminine. That’s why this feels like a nakedly feminist film.

“What really upsets me is when I hear men — and women say it too, because we’re all brainwashed in a society — ‘Yes, Elizabeth’s a very accomplished character, but why can’t she be a woman? Why does she have to be so masculine?’” adds Chastain. “That’s a very old-fashioned stereotype. It’s saying masculine qualities are to be ambitious, prepared, ruthless, intelligent, and feminine qualities are to be soft, gentle, compassionate and kind. It’s 2017!

“Femininity and masculinity are defined by each person. Sloane is feminine because she happens to be a woman. Full stop. We can each define what that means for us.”

The US presidential election seemed to illustrate this theme. Miss Sloane was made before, as Madden calls it, “the Trump cataclysm”.

Madden says the film was supposed to spark a debate about guns but 2016 revealed instead the “outrageous misogyny” women in powerful positions still face, so its message has shifted.

Savvy: Jessica Chastain plays a hard-nosed political lobbyist in Miss Sloane

As the journalist Tina Brown said when I interviewed her last year, “Women have to get up an hour earlier and have many more degrees after their name just to be considered”, and Hillary Clinton always noted that she had impressive approval ratings when she was doing a job but was hated when she was running for office.

Despite all her flaws, Miss Sloane is an inspiring character because of the drive she feels for her job. She’s brilliant — she gets a giant pretend rat to follow around a senator who changes his mind on backing her gun control bill, and is perpetually a step ahead of everyone.

As she puts it: “Lobbying is about foresight — about anticipating your opponent’s moves and devising countermeasures.” Interestingly, Madden says many viewers in the age group of Sloane’s team said they wanted to go and work for her.

The workplace sexism the film portrays — Sloane is patronised and belittled — is partly why women viewers especially end up rooting for her. Even the title emphasises that. “I hated the title,” admits Chastain.

“Because it’s like ‘little Miss Sloane’ and a modern women is ‘Ms’. But I understand it now, and it’s clever because it’s deliberately patronising. The title of the movie is sexist. It’s what they keep calling her in the film.”

The film flips gender roles too. Mark Strong is the moral centre — “the quiet, supportive character, that’s always the woman in these kinds of stories”, says Madden. “The men are standing outside doing the best they can.”

It is a triumvirate of women — the characters played by Chastain, Mbatha-Raw and Alison Pill — who are integral to the plot. Sloane, as much as she does have allies, collaborates with women.

This is a film that doesn’t just pass the Bechdel Test, it questions why the bar has been set so low.

As has been evident from reviews, Miss Sloane — both the film and the woman — make many men (especially male critics) feel uncomfortable.

“This character is very confronting for men,” concedes Chastain, who laudably hasn’t attempted to soften her.

As Madden notes, “Jessica is unusual in that she doesn’t think in terms of making an audience like her. It’s not in her playbook.” And yet, I bet, many viewers will be cheering Miss Sloane as the credits roll.

Miss Sloane is released on Friday.

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