Jessica Chastain plays a very driven lobbyist in the upcoming film, Miss Sloane, from Shakespeare in Love director John Madden. In the just-released trailer for the film — whose script by debut screenwriter Jonathan Perera /Film points out was on the 2015 Blacklist — the fourth wall is broken as Chastain delivers a dramatized professional lecture to the viewer.
Per the film’s official description, she’s a “ruthless lobbyist” who’s at once immensely good at what she does, but also driven to “win at all costs” — even the cost of her own career. The film sees her trying to push Senate to vote on a firearms background check bill, and the measures she takes clearly are bold enough to make for a tense political thriller, with what Entertainment Weekly describes as “enough plot twists to fit in a whole season of House of Cards.”
“The first moment I read the script [for “Miss Sloane”] I thought that the role belonged to Jessica,” the director told EW. “She has a reputation now as an actor that’s in a class — and people expect to see a level of performance from her that’s commanding and detailed and unusual. From tremendous strength and drive on the one hand and fragility and vulnerability on the other. And the scale on this film calls for both of those two things.” Madden also said that the film draws inspiration from Spotlight, in that it’s very much about the pursuit of a professional “goal,” and that it attempts to meticulously depict working in D.C.
The trailer alone makes it all look a bit self-serious and dictatorially Important, but perhaps the fourth-wall breaking will take up less of the film than it does the trailer.
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