After securing an interim agreement with SAG-AFTRA amid the ongoing Hollywood strikes, Jessica and her costars are currently promoting their new movie, Memory, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
Jessica’s character, Sylvia, is described as “a social worker who leads a simple and structured life” — which apparently gave the Oscar-winning actor a “fun” opportunity to go back to basics while shooting the movie.
“I was in Nashville at the time, and I went to Target,” she told the outlet. “We were moving quickly. I think I spent like $130 and I brought it back, and we did a fitting.”
After her shopping spree, Jessica said that the director, Michel Franco, still felt that her Target picks looked a little “too chic” for the role.
“There was a lot of let’s try and just scrub Jessica of any kind of movie star feeling that we can, which also I appreciated,” she said, adding that she styled her own hair every day on set too.
After the IndieWire interview was published this week, numerous outlets picked up on Jessica’s quotes, including the LA Times, which ran a headline focused mainly on the actor’s trip to Target as a means of getting “into character as a normal person.”
The headline read: “Jessica Chastain shopped at Target to get into character as a normal person ‘who leads a simple life’ for her new movie.”
Soon after the story was published yesterday, Jessica took to X — formerly known as Twitter — to criticize the way her quotes were presented.
“Such a shady & click bait headline,” she wrote, emphasizing that the experience of going to Target wasn’t a method acting ploy to help her feel “normal,” but is actually something she does “all the time.”
“The interesting part wasn’t that I shopped at Target (I do it all the time— best holiday decorations & school supplies).” she wrote. “It was that I got to get into character by shopping for my own costumes. That’s the not normal part.”
Since hitting back at the headline, Jessica has been praised by fans for taking matters into her own hands.
Just last week, Jessica admitted she felt “nervous” about promoting her new movie amid the ongoing strikes in Hollywood, revealing during a press conference in Venice that “there were actually some people on my team who advised me against it.”
Despite this, she still found a way to support her striking colleagues by giving a powerful speech and rocking a black “SAG-AFTRA on Strike” T-shirt on the red carpet — proving once more that she isn’t afraid to speak up.