IN her still-short film career Jessica Chastain has been regularly called upon to cry, and when that happens she has often found that her directors are anxious that she’ll exhaust herself in rehearsal. “They’ll say, ‘Save it, save it,’ ” said Ms. Chastain, who takes a certain pride in her active ducts. “I tell them: ‘Don’t worry. I have a bottomless well of tears.’ ”  Being a world-class weeper is not her only gift. This summer she has exuded ethereal earth mother vibes in “The Tree of Life,” and has gotten laughs as a touchingly exuberant Southern sexpot in the period drama “The Help.” In “Take Shelter,” set for release Sept. 30, Michael Shannon may have the showier role as a man in the process of mentally unraveling, but it is Ms. Chastain’s performance as his supportive wife that’s the beating heart of that psychological thriller. In “Texas Killing Fields,” a gritty procedural opening Oct. 7, moviegoers will discover Ms. Chastain’s version of a perp-slapping small-town cop. And in early December, she’ll appear as loyal Virgilia in Ralph Fiennes’s reworking of William Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus.”  The Jessica Chastain film festival continues Aug. 31 when “The Debt,” directed by John Madden, is released. That drama-thriller tells the timeline-jumping story of three Mossad agents — played by Ms. Chastain, Sam Worthington and Marton Csokas — on the trail of a Nazi war criminal in the mid-1960s, and the repercussions of their mission 30 years later. In preparation for the role, Ms. Chastain read mountains of material on the Holocaust, trained in the elbow-flinging Israel martial art of Krav Maga and pored over YouTube videos of a young Helen Mirren — who plays her character in 1997 — to memorize Ms. Mirren’s smallest facial tics and vocal inflections. When they first met to figure out ways to sync up their performances, Ms. Mirren immediately noticed that there was something she and Ms. Chastain already shared.  “I recognized my younger self in her in the sense of the seriousness and dedication to which she approaches the part,” Ms. Mirren said. “She’s dogged.”  Sam Worthington, who plays her introverted Mossad colleague, took his admiration a step further and helped engineer a screen reunion between them in the director Ami Canaan Mann’s “Texas Killing Fields.” (This time, Mr. Worthington plays Ms. Chastain’s troubled ex-husband, also a cop.) “I told Ami Mann: ‘Get this girl. Trust me. She’s sweet and soft, but she’s a chameleon,’ ” Mr. Worthington said.  Though Ms. Chastain (who doesn’t give out her age) seems to have burst all of a sudden onto the big screen, for the past four years or so she was becoming something of a trending topic in Hollywood. It started with Al Pacino, who cast her as the sulky princess in his as-yet-unreleased film “Wilde Salome,” based on a stage production that she had also starred in, and praised her to Terrence Malick, who cast her in “The Tree of Life.” Then Mr. Malick — who has hired Ms. Chastain for his next film, tentatively titled “The Burial” — spread the word to Steven Spielberg, whose company, DreamWorks, made “The Help”; to Jeff Nichols, the writer-director of “Take Shelter”; and to John Hillcoat, who put Ms. Chastain in his Prohibition-era gangster movie “The Wettest County in the World,” due next year.  “Sometimes I’ll have a meeting with someone and they’ll say, ‘Oh, Sean Penn was just here and was saying the nicest things about you,’ ” said Ms. Chastain, referring to her “Tree of Life” co-star. “You know when you’re applying for a job?” she said. “These are like my recommendations. It’s nice.”  When the red-haired, pale-skinned Ms. Chastain said this, she was sitting in the empty dining room of a restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel, taking a few tentative bites from a plate of watercress, raw artichoke and fava beans. “This is a very strange salad, I find; why is it so spicy?” she said, then quietly asked the waitress for a less exotic combination of romaine lettuce and sliced tomatoes.  At moments like these it’s easy to see that her career trajectory, whizzing from unknown-ish actress with six completed movies waiting for release to Next Big Thing, means that almost every day holds something brand new for her. In May, for example, it was dealing with the otherworldly red carpet hoopla at the Cannes Film Festival when “The Tree of Life” had its world premiere.  “If you watch it,” said Ms. Chastain, referring to footage of her standing sandwiched between her co-stars, Sean Penn and Brad Pitt, each grasping a hand of hers tightly as they posed for a wall of shouting paparazzi at the Palais des Festivals, “you can actually see them whispering in my ear. They’re going, like, ‘O.K., and now we’re going to turn around.’ ”  Born and raised in a Northern California suburb, Ms. Chastain is one of five children and describes her family as tightknit, middle-class and “really average.” (Her father is a firefighter; she dreams of someday buying her mother, a vegan chef, her own food truck.) If Ms. Chastain has anyone to thank for her interest in the dramatic arts, it’s her grandmother, who took her at age 7 to see a production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s crowd-pleasing musical “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” “It’s so embarrassing; you think, ‘That’s the reason I’m an actor?’ ” Ms. Chastain said, laughing. “But that was the moment that I realized acting is a job and that it was what I was supposed to do.”  After high school, with years of plays under her belt, she moved on to the Juilliard School of Drama in New York. She can still remember her parents’ reaction when her acceptance letter arrived, making her the first in her family to attend college. “I could see the fear in their faces. Like, ‘What is this Juilliard and how is it going to get paid for?’ ” Ms. Chastain said.  In her final year at Juilliard she was spotted in an acting showcase and instantly signed to a 12-month holding deal by the producer John Wells (“E.R.,” “The West Wing”). “In auditions, lots of people try to grab your attention,” Mr. Wells said. “But Jessica has this ability to be quite still. You’re always watching what she’s doing.”  There followed a post-college education of sorts: a touring theater production with Philip Seymour Hoffman, guest stints on “Veronica Mars” and “Law & Order: Trial by Jury.” Then films beckoned.  If there is one kind of watching that Ms. Chastain is on the fence about, it involves strangers who realize they’ve seen her in a movie. “I don’t want it to get in the way of me disappearing into my roles,” said the actress, who in a few weeks will start work on “Mamá,” a Guillermo Del Toro-produced horror film in which she plays a tattooed, child-hating bass player.  “And I get embarrassed really, really easily,” she added. “I get embarrassed even when people sing me ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”
Jessica Chastain, with roles in âThe Helpâ and âThe Tree of Life,â seemingly burst out of nowhere a complete movie star. The truthâs more complicated.