Jessica Chastain explains why she dropped out of high school

Jessica Chastain she didn’t have an easy childhood, but she always maintained that without her difficult family background she would never have discovered her deep love for acting.

Talking about her new role as Tammy Wynette in the upcoming film George & Tammy the actress spoke about her struggles as a teenager, dropping out of high school and finding an outlet in acting. Chastain said that while most dropouts just “smoke or sleep,” she sat in her car reading Shakespeare. She explained: «I was in high school and on a trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival I saw Marco Barricelli play Richard III. And something opened inside me. It was a very strange thing, that moved me so much. I had a huge crush on that actor.”

The Oscar winner continued: «I became obsessed with Shakespeare. My grandmother had just bought these ornamental books—she liked the design—they weren’t meant to be read. They were just on the shelf to be beautiful. One of these was the complete works of Shakespeare. I still keep it.” Jessica Chastain added that “it was the rhythm and the way the emotion was fueled” that drew her to those works. “I got to play Juliet twice, it’s my favorite part.” He observed: «Romeo is a bit weak, but Juliet says to the friar: “You married us, it’s your fault, and if you don’t sort it out I’ll kill myself and it will be your fault too. Do something! And Romeo is helpless. something is open inside, I wanted to play that role».

When asked what it meant to her to find Shakespeare at that particular moment, Chastain responded emotionally: “I felt like someone understood me in a particular way. I am moved to talk about it. It was as if someone was finally looking into me’, hinting that in her family the attention was decidedly not on her. When she dropped out of high school to devote herself to the theatre, she said: «In my family nobody stopped me, nobody told me: “You can’t be an actor”. But I’m sure that they would have preferred me to be a dentist».

The reason no one stopped her is that her younger sister was having a lot of trouble at the time and everyone was stressed. “When I didn’t graduate, nobody noticed. There wasn’t even a conversation like, “Aren’t we going to the graduation ceremony?” Anything”. Chastain had previously said that her sister had struggled with drug addiction and depression for years before taking his own life in 2003. “This has completely changed who I am. The movies, the Oscars, the clothes… nothing is that important,” she said.