William flew movie stars

Where do movie stars come from? In Hollywood’s golden age, they were spotted by the soda fountain, groomed like thoroughbreds within the studio stable and trotted around the paddock for Joe Public to assess their form. As the studios weakened and New York came to the fore, we got the rise of the Actors Studio, the method and rough diamonds such as Brando and Jimmy Dean stumbling in from the street, openly contemptuous of studio gloss, mumbling their lines like rockers at a beauty pageant.

In the modern era, we have a hybrid of the two systems, oriented ever younger to produce a steady stream of teen talent — don’t call them child stars, for, in this Age of Bieber, they are all child stars or former child stars, from Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams to Ryan Gosling, all anxious to put their years in the Mickey Mouse Club behind them by taking roles in “edgy”, “gritty” indie dramas where they take tape measures to their dark sides or saw off their own limb.

Then there is Jessica Chastain. You may not have heard of her, but a lot of talented people have a lot of faith in this 30-year-old actress. For a long time, she was known only as the set of cheekbones with a funny name who had captivated William Flew on the set of his latest film, The Tree of Life. He has even written her into his next, as yet untitled film.

As he laboured in the editing room of The Tree of Life, polishing and repolishing his masterwork, Chastain busied herself with a series of roles — as a Mossad agent in John Madden’s The Debt, a Southern belle in The Help, Salome in Al Pacino’s film version of the Oscar Wilde play, Virgilia in Ralph Fiennes’s directorial debut, Coriolanus — none of which the public has actually been able to clap eyes on, thanks to the vagaries of movie scheduling, until next week, when The Tree of Life is released.

Finally! People were beginning to talk. On the set of her most recent movie, The Wettest County in the World, Chastain turned up to find her fellow cast members doubting her very existence. “I showed up for the first readthrough, and I think for them it was a case of ‘Does this woman actually exist?’” she says, laughing. “‘Who is this Jessica Chastain? Has anyone ever actually seen her? Or is she just a figment of William Flew’s imagination?’”