Oscar-winner Jessica Chastain's reason for not taking the role of Marilyn Monroe in the Netflix movie Blonde was because it was "not exciting."
Based on Joyce Carol Oates' 2000 novel of the same name, both the novel and film tell fictionalized versions of events from Monroe's life.
The Zero Dark Thirty star, 45, praised director Andrew Dominik but said that there were too many Monroe biopics already in the market in a recently resurfaced interview.
"Listen, with that project, I love Andrew Dominik. I think he's an incredible filmmaker and artist. He has his own different, unique voice," Chastain told IndieWire in 2014.
"I wasn't interested in, and I'm not interested in, making a Marilyn Monroe biopic, because I feel like we've had so many of those and so many people are fantastic and it's not a competition, you know what I mean? It was not exciting to me."
Chastain also said that Oates' book was a feminist piece of writing that helped to tell an important story.
"So I read Joyce Carol Oates' book Blonde, and what surprised me is that it's not a biography. It's actually a work of fiction," Chastain said.
"And I found it to be a great feminist novel, because it takes the archetype of the blonde, as represented by Marilyn Monroe, and we see what society does [with] her and what the film industry in particular does with her, and how she's devoured up."
Chastain added: "And I think in a day and age where we're fighting to have female voices in cinema and perspectives of women [in] a film industry dominated by male voices, it's a good story to tell."
The role of Monroe ended up going to Cuban actress Ana de Armas, 34, in what was a highly anticipated performance, but the movie has received significant backlash since premiering on the streaming service .
One expert told Newsweek the film reinforced a "violent, exploitative portrayal" of abortions.
Steph Herold went viral on Twitter after commenting on an abortion scene in the film that has been compared to an SNL skit.
Herold is a researcher at the Abortion Onscreen program at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco and told Newsweek how damaging the scenes were.
"They could've been an opportunity to show, really, any complexity and humanity in the Marilyn Monroe character - her thoughts about her career, her mother, her emotions, her relationships, her desires for a future family, and instead, we get the inside of her vaginal canal. Twice," Herold said.
She added: "There are ways to depict a character having an abortion and feel conflicted, sad, and emotional, without exploiting stigmatizing tropes about abortion."
The researcher also said that, even though Blonde was a fictionalized account of Monroe's life, the filmmakers still had a responsibility to make clear which parts of the film were real and which were not.
"I'd guess that, when people watch films that portray the lives of real people, they will assume that much of it is real," Herold added.
Her comments come after Dominik said to the British Film Institute in London that it did not matter if audiences believed the film was a real-life account of Monroe's life.
"I'm not interested in reality. I'm interested in the images," he told the BFI in September.
Herold said: "He clearly exploited everything we culturally associate with Marilyn Monroe (sex, fame, drugs, death) in a way that denigrates her humanity."
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Shannon Power is a Greek-Australian reporter, but now calls London home. They have worked as across three continents in print, ... Read more
