Stop if you’ve heard this one before: Woman frames an argument to support other women, subtlety tears down another woman in the process. Oh, hey there, Jessica Chastain.
“I’m really, really supportive of women in Hollywood. I love Meryl Streep. She’s such an incredible actress. But I feel like she’s the only one in her age group who gets those parts. I’d like to see Jessica Lange in a movie again, you know? Or Susan Sarandon. Why isn’t Viola Davis a lead in a film? She’s one of the greatest actresses alive,” she said of her fellow famous starlets. “And where are the Asian actors and actresses? I’m not saying, ‘We don’t want movies about men.’ I’m just saying, ‘Come on, all the men I know love women. So let’s also have some stories about these women. Let’s write something for them, guys — and let’s make room for women writers, too.'”
Jessica Chastain is two years and some change from 40, so she’s staring her own Hollywood mortality square in the face, so this is pretty much a preemptive strike. She wants older women to have more roles in films, you know, except one specific older woman. And why isn’t Viola Davis a lead in a film? Because producers know Octavia Spencer is an automatic bolt on for whatever she’s in, so maybe she should handle that first. I’d like to see Jessica Lange in a film as well, but she’s been absolutely killing it on AHS, so why in the hell would she want to be in some movie just to be in one? And where are the Asian actors and actresses? Uh, I don’t know, maybe Asia? Everything you see on screen in America is basically a South Korean, Chinese, or Japanese remake going back to The Magnificent Seven (The Departed, Oldboy (the original made three times its budget, the remake lost $26M) , Godzilla, literally every single horror movie, the list goes on), so why do the Wal-Mart knock off here when you can get the real shit in Asia? Ask Zhang Ziyi or Choi Min-sik if they’re losing any sleep about not being in Transformers. The American film industry is supported the way everything else in America is supported. They borrow from China.
