Jessica Chastain's Meteoric Rise Taking Her to “The Wettest Country”

Maybe you haven't yet heard of Jessica Chastain, but she's about to become ubiquitous, a state that will only continue if she joins John Hillicoat's upcoming Western.

Hillicoat is hoping to Chastain will join Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf in the cast of "The Wettest Country," Hardy's love interest, according to The Hollywood Reporter. 

The Prohibition Era film is being written by Aussie rock god Nick Cave (who's also doing the music), and based on the Matt Bondurant novel "The Wettest County in the World."

Here's this from the Publisher's Weekly review:

This fictionalized tale of Depression-era bootlegging ... enlists the help of Winesburg, Ohio author Sherwood Anderson to investigate Bondurant family lore. In 1928, a pair of thieves accost Bondurant's real life great-uncle Forrest at his Franklin County, Va., restaurant. They're after a large cache of bootlegging money and end up cutting Forrest's throat. The story of his survival and his trek to a hospital 12 miles away has taken on mythical proportions by the time Sherwood Anderson arrives in Franklin County in 1934 to research a magazine piece on the area's prolific moonshiners. Soon after Anderson's arrival, two anonymous men appear at the same hospital, one with legs meticulously shattered from ankle to hip, the other one castrated, with the by-products of the deed deposited in a jar of moonshine.

After doing a bunch of television work over the past few years, Chastain was cast in two films that never went into wide release, "Stolen," and "Jolene." Nonetheless, she must've made an impression, because in the next year or so she'll be seen in "The Debt," with Sam Worthington; "Take Shelter" with Michael Shannon; "Tree of Life" with Brad Pitt and from director Terrence Malick; Al Pacino's "Wild Salome"; Ralph Fiennes' "Coriolanus"; "The Fields" with Worthington and Chloe Grace Moretz; and "The Help" with Emma Stone.

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