Jessica Chastain: I'm the unknown everyone's already sick of.

It's tough, acting. You have to walk two lines of a tightrope. There's the all-consuming fear of failure: I'm about to fall flat on my face. There's that and there's also confidence - you have to be confident in order to try things - and they fight each other all the time.

Jessica Chastain

fighting order fall

If you don't fully take every moment and love every moment and every person that you're with, your life will be over before you realise.

Jessica Chastain

realising and-love moments

I feel like the bigger risks that I take, the more I learn. I know that I learn more from my failures than successes.

Jessica Chastain

bigger risk feels

I always say I am a realist, and my mom says, "No, you just have anxiety."

Jessica Chastain

realist anxiety mom

The most important thing in my life, and the thing I try to focus on, is to try not to live a life of cruelty. That means trying to make sure I look people in the eye when I meet them. Sometimes you jump in a taxi, or maybe you only have two minutes with someone, and you never see them again. I try to always look them in the eye and have a real experience of what it is to communicate with someone.

Jessica Chastain

grateful real mean

We need more points of view from women and we need more support for female directors and writers in the industry.

Jessica Chastain

support views directors

Every time an actress is celebrated for her great work, I cheer. For the more brilliant their performance, the more the audience demands stories about women... And as we all know: a great year for women in film, is just a great year for film.

Jessica Chastain

great-year cheer years

You know, it's recently come into focus for me why I want to be an actor: It's because of the connection I feel to people.

Jessica Chastain

connections focus people

I think both nature and grace live within everyone, and I always strive to be in a world of grace and compassion.

Jessica Chastain

compassion grace thinking

If someone does something bad to you, you do something worse to them so they never mess with you again.

Jessica Chastain

mess you-again doe

To a female superhero her sexiness is not the most important thing about her, it's her mind, her spirit, and when I look at that character that to me is an example of characters that I like to play and I think it does a great thing for women.

Jessica Chastain

play character thinking

I don’t mind if the character is a small character, but I would just like her to have a journey in the film. Sometimes the characters are just there as a prop to further the man’s story. The great directors I’ve talked to, I’ve said listen, I don’t mind playing a woman that is a tiny part, but how does the story affect her? What can I play in the end that’s different from the beginning? Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense, because it’s just like being a prop.

Jessica Chastain

journey character men

No matter what, I'm going to ask for more.

Jessica Chastain

no-matter-what asks matter

I am the first one in my family to go to college and I felt a great responsibility when I was at school, because my family was making so many sacrifices for me to be there. I was raised by a single mother, my grandmother got on the plane and helped me move to New York and moved me into the dorm. It was just a big moment, and, yes, it was my dream to be an actress, but also I didn't want to let them down.

Jessica Chastain

mother dream moving

An actress friend of mine shared a great trick. She told me to stick my tongue behind my teeth when I smile to keep from over-smiling. If you smile without doing it, sometimes your gums show a little too much. It's an actor's trick!

Jessica Chastain

gum teeth actors

Women perform great in the box office. Audiences want to see lead female characters.

Jessica Chastain

female office character

Put others before yourself, unselfish love, do unto others as you would have done to you.

Jessica Chastain

unselfish unselfish-love done

I've spent my life being embarrassed.

Jessica Chastain

embarrassed

I've actually been given a great gift. When I walk into an audition with a director, I'm carrying no baggage. They haven't seen me in anything, even though I've done nine films.

Jessica Chastain

done nine directors

I find that the monsters are usually the people that I have the most empathy for because they're the ones that are hurt the most. There's a reason why they're the monsters.

Jessica Chastain

empathy hurt people