Jessica Chastain Was Once Told She Wasn’t Allowed to Work With Brad Pitt in a Film

Brad Pitt was one actor that the Zero Dark Thirty star Jessica Chastain never thought she’d work with. Especially since she lost a role in a potential Pitt film because of who she was in the movie industry.

Jessica Chastain wasn’t big enough to work with Brad Pitt

Chastain once shared that she wasn’t initially meant to co-star with Pitt in a Tree of Life. Before the Terrence Malick feature, Chastain was still a bit of an unknown. She tried auditioning with Pitt in another film, and couldn’t secure the role because of her lack of starpower.

“Right before I auditioned for the Tree of Life, I was a complete unknown,” Chastain once told Vanity Fair. “And there was an audition for a film that Brad was going to do, and I was supposed to play opposite him. And I was trying to get an audition, and then I heard back, ‘Never cast an unknown opposite Brad Pitt.’ So I couldn’t even go in and audition.”

When she was cast in Tree of Life, her husband was going to be another actor. But as luck would have it, her co-star would drop out of the project. Pitt would later be cast in his place.

“And I thought, in four months it went from ‘we’ll never cast an unknown opposite Brad Pitt to, now, I am playing his wife. I just could feel like something in my life had clicked, and that things had started to change,” she said.

Jessica Chastain was tired of being asked about kissing Brad Pitt

With Chastain and Pitt playing a married couple in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, many were curious about their make-out scenes. Not even Chastain expected to ever lock lips with the Oscar-winner when she was an up and coming actor.

“I’ve always tried to choose characters who were interesting to me and didn’t really follow the money path,” Chastain once told The Wall Street Journal. “But working with Brad Pitt? I never really imagined that someday I would play his wife. It’s like, wow is this really my life? And then you just have to get rid of that feeling on go on.”

During their time on set, Chastain commented on the actor’s modest approach to collaboration, which surprised Chastain given his celebrity.

“He doesn’t carry himself as an international movie star and doesn’t want to be treated any differently,” she said.

But when it came to kissing the star, Chastain fielded so many questions about their on-screen romance that it became exhausting.

“Okay, this is gonna be a bit silly, but the question I get asked over and over again is, ‘What’s it like kissing Brad Pitt,’” she once said in an interview with Dinner Party.

She confided that the question was especially frustrating when she tried talking about other important aspects of the feature.

“Yeah, and it wasn’t even like that deep of a kiss, it was just like a, you know, sweet, normal husband and wife kiss at the end of the movie,” Chastain said. “And for the longest time I would be having interviews talking about the idea of nature versus grace in this beautiful film that Terrence Malick made, and everyone would ask me about kissing Brad Pitt, and I just thought ‘Wow, okay, I understand where your mind is.'”

Jessica Chastain thought her film with Brad Pitt was cursed

Although Chastain managed to snag the role, it took quite some time for Tree of Life to hit the big screen. This made Chastain feel that the project was experiencing the same kind of misfortune that her other films did.

“Last year, we were joking that there was a Chastain curse. I’d done 11 films in four years and for some reason they’d all been paused. I’d tell my friends and family, ‘I swear to you, I’m in this movie with Brad Pitt!’ Or I’d meet with a film-maker and I’d go, ‘I really want to do your movie – but if you put me in it, it may not come out for years,’” Chastain once told The Guardian.

Tree of Life would finally hit theaters in 2011.