But when we meet on a cool morning in a quiet corner of the Mercer Hotel in New York, Chastain casual and demure in a dark-blue sweater and jeans (albeit with sparkly Missoni pumps), drinking green tea and picking delicately at a fruit salad, she is unstarry, and thus far seems unaffected by her rise to---fame - which was slow or quick, depending on your perspective. "I'm a shadow whisperer, I hide in the shadows," she says with a smile. "And I tend to avoid places where I might get photographed and end up with my picture in the press. I just don't think of myself as a movie star - I'm an actress." Chastain's desire for a low-key, under-the-radar lifestyle matches her level-headedness about her work-life balance. Given how long she waited to reach this point, I'm surprised when she reveals that she is halfway through a seven-month hiatus, since finishing Guillermo del Toro's period horror film Crimson Peak, due out early next year.
"That part was the hardest thing I have ever done. I gave so much and went to some very dark places," she says, without a hint of actressy drama. "When I'd finished I felt like I didn't want to act anymore. And I do love acting. But I realised that, if I didn't take a break, it was going to take too much of a toll on me."
It's a brave thing to do when you're at the top of your game, I comment. "I think it'll make me a better actor," she says. "Because, when I do show up on set, I'll be excited again. Making films can be very lonely, and that's the part I don't like. I don't want to feel like I'm pressing pause on my personal life to make a movie. I want to feel like I'm still creating relationships and things are moving forward. [I needed] to find my people and find my home and check in with myself. So I left a few projects and turned some other things down."
Over the next few months, though, there will be no danger of her being forgotten. In January she stars in A Most Violent Year, a thriller set in New York in 1981. That will be followed by Crimson Peak and the quirky The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby, which will be released as three full-length films each told from different points of view and starring Chastain in the title role opposite James McAvoy. And then there's Miss Julie, an adaptation of August Strindberg's play, in which she stars opposite Colin Farrell.
But the most high-profile of all the new releases is Interstellar - arguably her biggest film to date, in terms of both budget and mass appeal - in which she stars alongside Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Michael Caine.
The film is set in the future and McConaughey plays a widowed engineer who leaves behind his two children as he attempts to transcend the limits of space travel and to save humankind. Chastain plays one of his adult daughters. The film to be as ambitious in scale as one would expect of Nolan. "But it's also a very emotional, beautiful story," says Chastain. "To me it's all about fathers and daughters. Christopher Nolan does all these big, high-tech things, but he's a big softie and very much a family man. Most of my scenes were really about relationships."
As for Chastain's own life, she has long resisted dating fellow actors. "It just puts a magnifying glass on you," she says. "If you want to be really famous, then date another famous person. But the fame is not the part of my life that I am excited about." She concedes, however, that potential partners do have to appreciate the nature of the business. "I think you have to date someone who understands some aspects of the film industry. I mean, I'm going to be in Northern Ireland kissing Colin Farrell, so I have to date a guy who is really confident in himself and isn't insecure about all of that."
Since last year that guy has been Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo, an Italian fashion executive who is currently based in Milan. Although wary of discussing him ("I won't talk about my love life until I'm engaged," she has said), Chastain declares herself "very, very happy" in the relationship. He is a large part of the reason she has moved from Los Angeles to New York. "It's just so much closer to Europe," she says. And, much as she might try to dodge the magnifying glass and hide in the shadows, she can't quite manage it entirely: a few days after we meet paparazzi shots of her and de Preposulo strolling hand-in-hand in New York are published on the internet.
Jessica Chastain in Interstellar.
Born Jessica Howard (Chastain is her mother's maiden name), she grew up in Sacramento, California, the eldest of five children in a blue-collar family with no showbusiness connections. Her father, Mike, is a fireman; her mother, Jerrie, a stay-at-home mother. The family is close-knit - when we meet, her parents are visiting from California, staying in her apartment a few blocks away in NoHo, where she lives with her three-legged rescue dog, Chaplin. Her youngest brother, who is 15, stayed all summer while attending film school.
"My family treat me very normally - they keep me very grounded and we don't talk about the fact that I'm in movies," Chastain says. "But now my little brother is interested in movies, so we went to see Boyhood as a family the other night." She gives a wry smile. "Before, I was always trying to get people to go to the movies with me and no one in my family was really very interested."
Chastain is the first person in her family to have graduated from college. "And the majority of women in my family started having children when they were teenagers - I was the first not to do that too," she tells me. "Everyone in my family has a beautiful, wonderful life and incredible children, but I just knew that I wanted to do something else, and that always pushed me forward."
She does want children of her own. "But when I have kids I want to make my kids my priority, not my work. I can't be working like I have been recently."
When Chastain was 7, her grandmother took her to a production of Joseph And His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat starring David Cassidy. A girl of a similar age to her was playing the narrator. "As soon as I saw that I was like, 'Oh my god, this is my job, this is what I am,'" she says. "I've always had an active imagination, and I didn't do very well in the public-school system, but that was a complete aha moment for me."
Her parents were supportive, she says. "But they weren't going to drive me to LA for auditions or anything."
So the teenage Chastain acted in plays in and around San Francisco, and, after one particularly well-received production of Romeo and Juliet, was encouraged by a fellow actor to apply to Juilliard, the prestigious New York drama school. She won a scholarship, funded by the late Robin Williams, himself an alumnus.
She landed a series of high-profile stage roles after graduation - alongside Michelle Williams in The Cherry Orchard, Al Pacino in Salomé and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Othello - but her film career didn't advance as she had hoped. A slim, 5ft 4in redhead with a porcelain complexion, she began to worry that in Los Angeles - where she had moved for the work opportunities - her looks could be holding her back.
"I kept getting the weirdest feedback from auditions," she says. "I would be told the director really liked me but then he decided to go with a model. I didn't understand what it meant. A few times I seriously considered going blonde. I thought, 'Maybe I'll just be part of the system, try to look like everyone else.'"
These days she is far more comfortable in her skin, and even has a contract with Yves Saint Laurent Beauté (she is the face of Manifesto l'Eclat scent). "When I was in my 20s I was always trying to fix something to get a part, to try to make my space in the world. But when I think about it now, everything I was trying to do was about not being me. And actually, the best way to find your place in the world is just to be exactly yourself."
She recognises that is not always so easy in Hollywood, where women are still competing for far fewer decent roles than men. "I think there is a huge problem in American cinema: stories about women aren't nurtured or celebrated or brought to the screen as often as stories about men. There's a real inequality and it can't be justified," she says. "You can't assume that a male-led movie will make more money than a female-led movie."
She cites the example of Luc Besson's Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson, which opened at the top of the American box office shortly before we meet. "So clearly people are interested in films starring women."
In 2013 Chastain herself became the first woman in 50 years to achieve the rare feat of having the lead role in the top two films in the same week - Zero Dark Thirty and the supernatural horror-thriller Mama.
Chastain is fascinated by the Bechdel Test, which was devised by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel and which judges films according to whether they feature at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. "I don't talk about men that much," she says, looking baffled by the idea that one would. "When I'm with my girlfriends I ask, 'What are you doing? How's your life? How's your job? How are your kids?'
"I'm feeling a sea change coming in movies, though," she says. "I hope I get to partake in it, but, if not, that's fine. Anything I can do to help the women that are coming after me, that would be great too."
Interstellar is in cinemas now.
