Jessica Chastain Reveals Her Grandmother’s Hilarious Flirtatious Attempts With Bradley Cooper

One of the best parts of getting older is not caring what others think about you. Jessica Chastain was a recent guest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and she shared a hilarious story about her grandmother’s gumption that is a prime example of this truth. While promoting her new film The 355, Chastain recounted the time that her grandmother, Marilyn Herst, made a play for Bradley Cooper.

“My grandmother, I’ve been trying to get her dates for a long time. It’s been maybe 15 years, 20 years, I used to take pictures of her and put them on Match.com,” Chastain explained. However, her grandmother was more Interested in Chastain’s proximity to A-listers. “I worked with Al Pacino, she was very excited about that. I took a picture of them and it’s on her bedside table. Matthew McConaughey, she was stoked.” 

Play video

However, Herst got hilariously brazen with Cooper in particular. “A few years ago, I had a party at my house and Bradley Cooper was there and my grandmother is now at the age where she just really doesn’t care,” Chastain joked. “She’s like, ‘I’m just going to do whatever I want.’ So in the middle of the party, she just walked over to Bradley and just sat on his lap.” 

According to Chastain, Cooper was rightfully disturbed by this kind of behavior from a total stranger. “He looked horrified, actually. He’d never met her. He didn’t know who she was,” Chastain said. “And immediately, I saw it kind of happening in slow motion where I was like, ‘Nooo!’ And I just started going, ‘It’s my grandma. It’s my grandma. It’s my grandma.’ And then he was like, ‘OK, OK, OK, hi, Grandma!’”

Chastain’s latest film The 355 opens on Jan. 7, and she explained to ET that she was passionate about equal pay for herself and costars Penelope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o, and Bingbing Fan. “The actresses are all owners of the film,” Chastain explained. “We raised the money independently. We made it without a studio, without a studio system and we made it for a fraction of what a film like this would normally cost, so it was really exciting to bring this into the world in that way.”