Interviews of Hollywood women have been talking female agency for about five years now. It’s gospel to say the words, but we rarely hear very specific examples of real results.

Jessica Chastain’s cover story interview ‘Jessica Chastain: The Good Fight’ for Marie Claire’s Holiday 2022/23 Issue breaks that mold. Chastain shares a real-life example of how a scene was altered in the Showtime limited series ‘George & Tammy’, based on country music icon Tammy Wynette and her relationship with fellow musician George Jones.

Chastain explains to Marie Claire’s writer Justine Harman how major changes were made in a first-episode scene, a brilliant example of how women [and men, for that matter] can create change.

Being a Powerful Producer Helps to Create Change

It helps when changemakers have the power of Jessica Chastain, who is now considered a big-budget Hollywood mainstay, also one who has a strong longterm draw for a film.

Women watch the actor’s 22 and counting films years later, just because it’s a Jessica Chastain film.

"She's always, like, three or four things deep," says Kelly Carmichael, president of production and development at Freckle Films, the company Chastain founded in 2017 with an eye toward female-led projects, including ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’. "There's no part of our industry that she doesn't see as a learning opportunity."

With her own company behind the Showtime miniseries ‘George & Tammy’, out now, Chastain was determined to give her “Stand By Your Man’ country singer “main character energy.”

The actor takes issue with the idea that Tammy Wynette was a doormat, reminding us that Wynette was married five times.

Chastain explains that in a film where she is more than just the lead actor or co-star, she can “police the writing.” You get to say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We need to honor women as human beings. And they make their own choices—just like men do.'"

The male character of George Jones is played by Michael Shannon, who has an excellent relationship with Chastain.

As scripted, the scene went something like:
DON (picture a pencil neck with an ego): You're going to fuck my wife, aren't you, George?
GEORGE (Michael Shannon): Yes, I'm going to fuck her.
"[Michael] changed the line from, 'Yes, I'm going to fuck her'—excuse the language—to, 'I sure would like to," Chastain remembers. "The second he said, 'I sure would like to,' it was like, 'Oh, yes, this is happening. Because he sees her as someone who gets to make the decision. And that's working with an actor who's very aware he doesn't own me." Another perk of being producer? You get to pick your scenemates. "We were so in tune with one another," says Shannon, who first met Chastain on the set of 2011's Take Shelter. "The notion of sitting in front of another man and looking at a woman and proclaiming that you're going to fuck her, seems a little neanderthal to me. I mean, if I was the woman in question, I wouldn't enjoy that so much."

The ‘neanderthal’ reference was perfect, and I guarantee that multiple women reading this text will have memories of similar experiences, and many men will have memories, too.

Not only was Tammy Wynette’s life challenging, but Jessica Chastain’s own background was hardly white-picket fence worthy and an existence of white privilege.

"My mom raised me. I was very close to my grandmother, who was single most of her life." Women who had choices to make. "I remember I was in sixth grade, my sister was in fourth grade, my brother was in first grade, and my mom was out working as a bartender. We were home all the time alone at night. It was just like, 'We're taking care of ourselves,'" she says. "There was no other option. My mom couldn't afford childcare, and she was trying to just get us fed. Getting food was the big deal."

Writer Justine Harman notes that Chastain’s life narrative has been rewritten as follows: “Middle class California girl and daughter of teenage sweethearts etc etc follows an acting pal to Juilliard, where she receives the Robin Williams scholarship, meets talented besties Oscar Isaac and Jeremy Strong on the acting scene, and bingo bango, a best actress Oscar nod for ‘Zero Dark Thirty’. It's a nice little narrative arc, but the reality has far less to do with luck than it does hard-nosed determination.”

As a mother of two children, rarely seen Giulietta and Augustus, Jessica Chastain shares a sweet story about her daughter, who responded to a convo about her future life by saying that she wants to be a mama, when she grows up. Chastain responded by saying:

And I was like, 'That's a great thing to be. But you know, you can be more than one thing.'
She's like, 'What do you mean?'
I said, 'Well, look at me, honey. I'm a mama. I'm an actress. I'm a producer. I'm a business owner. I'm a friend. I'm a cook. I started listing all these things. Like, I am many things, so you can be whatever you want. You can be the president. You can be a ballerina. You can be a mama. And it was so shocking for her to hear all of this."

Now that is a fascinating real-life story, when a pro-woman mother like Jessica Chastain, one who has been so careful to create a wide-bearth world around her own children, sees confusion and perplexity in the eyes of her daughter over the idea that she can have multiple roles in life.

Jessica Chastain is styled by Elizabeth Stewart in fashion from Dsquared2, Erdem, Gucci, Michael Kors collection, Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini, Polo Ralph Lauren, Victoria Beckham and more. Jessica Chou [IG] is behind these rich images. See Marie Claire for the fashion credits.