Jessica Chastain Reveals How Her Relationship With Oscar Isaac Changed After HBO Show

Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac‘s friendship was forever changed by the taxing shooting of Scenes from a Marriage. In this 2021 HBO miniseries created by Hagai Levi, Chastain, and Isaac, who have been friends since their early days at Juilliard Drama School, are emotionally put through the wringer. Scenes from a Marriage was inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s own 1973 miniseries of the same name, which starred the pair as Jonathan and Mira, a married couple whose relationship is in shambles due to Mira’s infidelity and Jonathan’s deeply ingrained religious repressions. Spanning five episodes, it played out as a collection of long dialogues between the two characters, often pointing out their weaknesses to each other, which resulted in long scenes of yelling, tears, and breakdowns from both characters. 

Vanity Fair recently interviewed Chastain about how the series, filmed during the height of the pandemic in the fall of 2020, impacted their long-term friendship. “‘Scenes from a Marriage’ was very tough. And I love Oscar [Isaac], but the reality is, our friendship has never quite been the same,” Chastain said. “We’re going to be OK, but after that, I was like, I need a little bit of a breather. There was so much I love you, I hate you in that series.” In 2021, Chastain told the outlet the most challenging part of the project was thinking differently about Isaac. “I’ve seen Oscar for 20 years in one way,” she said. “So I changed his name on my phone to [his character name] Jonathan, because every time he texted me, it would be a reminder of what we were doing. Somebody had given me this book a long time ago for my husband and I—we never filled it out because it’s kind of cheesy—like, what was your favorite memory of the wedding? So I filled it out from Mira’s point of view, and then I gave it to Oscar and he filled it out from Jonathan’s point of view. So we got to read each other’s answers and create a backstory.”

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Previously, Chastain said that their friendship influenced their performances, telling the “TODAY” show in 2021, “We’ve been friends for more than half our lives and we know so much about each other. So we know how to make each other laugh without even saying anything. We can almost read each other’s minds but, it also means we could hurt each other really strongly. In the scenes, we would know how to get to the other one.”