Jessica Chastains painterly Vogue pictorial: beautiful or budget?

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Jessica Chastain covers the new issue of Vogue Mag, which will be out on stands on November 19th. I think this cover is a mess. And yes, art history majors, I know the cover is based on a painting, but I still think this is just a mess for a cover shot. Especially now that I’ve looked at the full slideshow, which you can see here. There were several really striking Annie Leibovitz photos that would have made gorgeous covers. This shot is just awkward. Still, this is Jessica’s first American Vogue cover, so holla. I like Jessica, but she’s kind of a snooze as an interview. Here are some highlights from the excerpt Vogue has released thus far:

On playing Salome: “I did not feel like a beautiful woman that people would kill each other for. Jessica—who I am in my personal life—I’m very shy, I feel very awkward, I don’t feel like a femme fatale at all.”

Guillermo del Toro on Jessica: “She is never guarded, but she is very protective of not having to be an open book. The crew loves her, the cast loves her, but that doesn’t mean that she has to cook a dinner for 25 people every Friday.”

Her real life: Her Facebook page, unusually well curated and full of “xxjes”s to her fans, charts her movements, from Paris Fashion Week to Jay Leno, but speak to friends and the picture that emerges is of a life that has remained more or less unchanged since Chastain’s days as a student at Juilliard, which she attended after winning a Robin Williams–funded scholarship. An early riser, she likes shopping for food at the local farmer’s market, doesn’t drink much, and is far more likely to be found at home playing Scrabble with friends, or else catching the latest Michael Haneke movie at the Angelika, than stumbling out of a nightclub at 3:00 a.m.

[From Vogue]

I do think she’s genuinely shy – not, like, Rooney Mara’s forced, hipster shy-aloofness, which is really just a rich girl’s entitlement and general lack of interest in anything outside of her world. Jessica seems like a fish out of water at most of the big Hollywood events, and she seems like a quiet, studious girl who has worked crazy-hard to get where she is and she deathly afraid of saying anything that might mess it up. Still, that makes for a boring interview (but I like Jessica anyway).

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Photos courtesy of Annie Leibovitz/VOGUE.

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