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Jessica Chastain is an American actress who has appeared in film, television, and stage. As a final-year student at the Juilliard School, she was signed on for a talent holding deal by the television producer John Wells. From 2004 to 2010, she had guest roles in several television shows, including ER, Veronica Mars and Law & Order: Trial by Jury. She also appeared in stage productions with Michelle Williams for The Cherry Orchard in 2004, and with Al Pacino for Salome in 2006. In 2008, Chastain made her film debut as the title character in Jolene, an adaptation of E. L. Doctorow's short story Jolene: A Life. She had a minor role in Stolen (2009), a critically panned mystery-thriller, following which she played the younger version of Helen Mirren's character in The Debt (2010).
The year 2011 proved to be a breakthrough for Chastain. Among her six film releases that year, she played opposite Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life, an experimental drama from the director Terrence Malick, and portrayed an aspiring socialite in 1960s America in The Help, an adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's novel of the same name. For the latter, Chastain received her first Academy Award nomination in the supporting actress category. In 2012, she voiced Gia in the $747 million-grossing animated film Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted. She also played a CIA analyst in Kathryn Bigelow's thriller Zero Dark Thirty—a partly fictionalized account of the manhunt for Osama bin Laden—which garnered her an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination.
Also in 2012, Chastain made her Broadway debut with a revival of The Heiress, playing the role of a naive young girl who transforms into a powerful woman. In 2013, she starred in the horror film Mama, and played an unhappily married woman in Ned Benson's The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, a drama told in three parts—Him, Her and Them. Chastain's biggest live-action commercial successes came in the next two years with the science fiction films, Interstellar (2014) and The Martian (2015), both of which grossed over $600 million worldwide. In the former, directed by Christopher Nolan, she played a scientist, and in the latter, directed by Ridley Scott, she featured as an astronaut alongside Matt Damon.