Photo by Keystone
No one can accuse Jessica Chastain of doing the same thing twice. After playing a grief-stricken young mother in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, a gritty secret agent in the revenge thriller The Debt, and a beautiful bimbette in The Help, the actress has signed on to star opposite Tom Cruise in an as-yet-untitled sci-fi project. Helmed by Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski, the movie is set in a dystopian future where the population lives in the clouds high above an uninhabitable Earth. Cruise’s character works down below, repairing drones that combat the hostile aliens currently invading the planet; Chastain plays his skybound girlfriend. When he falls for an enigmatic woman who has crashed into earth, a fiery love triangle develops. We’d watch out if we were Cruise: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and if her fight scenes in The Debt are any indication, Chastain has a mean left hook. -Allison Friedman