Jessica Chastain ensures that her costars in The 355 will be equally paid for their work

She has been nominated for two Academy Awards and has won a Golden Globe Award for her work on Zero Dark Thirty.

And ahead of the film’s release, Jessica Chastain has stated that she will be receiving the same pay as her costars for the upcoming spy thriller film The 355.

The film, which is currently set for a 2022 release, will also feature Lupita Nyong’o, Penelope Cruz, and Diane Kruger.

The 43-year-old spoke to Shape about how she brought the idea up to her costars and noted that if they were being looked to as promoters for the film, then they needed to be paid accordingly.

‘A lot of times, our names are used to sell movies, and that’s how the money is raised for them,’ she explained, ‘so I thought, If our names are being sold, then we need to be the owners of the film.’

She then told her castmates that in lieu of looking to a major studio to completely prop up the project’s financial ends, they would take an active role in raising funds fo the film in order to receive a direct portion of its profits.

The actress recounted the pitch that she gave to her costars: ‘We’re going to sell the distribution rights to raise the budget for the film, and then everyone owns a portion of the box office.’ 

The actress was surprised that the deal had actually worked in her favor, but also intimated that her push for a different pay standard had the potential to start a new trend of performers retaining ownership of their own projects.  

‘I don’t know if anything like this has been done before, and honestly, I’m a bit shocked I got away with it…But hopefully it creates a new model in which artists can own their work,’ she stated.

This is not the first time that Chastain has made a push for a costar to receive fair payment for their work; in 2011, she successfully campaigned for Octavia Spencer to get five times the amount she requested for working on The Shape Of Water.

In speaking about her work efforts for equal payment on The 355, the Molly’s Game actress noted that she preferred to have her actions speak louder than her words. 

She said: ‘When it comes to fighting for pay equality, I would rather just do it and not talk about it. I think it’s actually more powerful if I don’t have to explain it.’ 

In addition to starring in the upcoming feature, Chastain will also serve as one of its producers; Simon Kinberg helmed the film in addition to acting as another producer and co-writing its screenplay.

The story will follow a CIA agent who teams up with a number of other operatives from multiple countries in order to recover a highly secret weapon. 

The idea for the film was proposed to its director by Chastain while the two were both working on the 2019 superhero film Dark Phoenix.

The film wrapped production in 2020 and was set to be distributed the following year, but the circumstances forced upon the film industry by the global pandemic caused its release to be delayed.