Over the past few years, Jessica Chastain has become a common fixture going into each awards season thanks to a string of strong performances across Zero Dark Thirty, A Most Violent Year and even Interstellar. That piping hot streak will continue before the year’s end via Miss Sloane, a biting drama in which Chastain plays a staunch lobbyist. Can the timely political piece catapult the actress to her first Academy Award? We’ll find out soon enough.
Not one to rest on her laurels, further down the pipeline Jessica Chastain has lined up Woman Walks Ahead, a Native America drama that places her in the shoes of Caroline Weldon. A Brooklyn artist who becomes drawn to the Standing Rock Reservation to advise Sioux chieftain Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes), Weldon wrote her name into the history books during the 19th century as one of the few to empathize with the chieftain and his people, and would go on to be demonized in the press as “Sitting Bull’s white squaw.”
We now have our first look at Chastain’s character, courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter. Pictured here on horseback, this is a plot of land that has been occupying headlines for weeks now courtesy of the ongoing protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Woman Walks Ahead taps into a different kind of true-life conflict, though, and we understand the film carries a script by Steven Knight (Locke).
Caroline Weldon is an artist who moves from Brooklyn to the Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas to advise Sioux chieftain Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes) as he fights to keep the land for his people. She wrote letters to the federal government on behalf of Sitting Bull and eventually lived on the land with her teenage son for several years, even though she was vilified by the press, which called her “Sitting Bull’s white squaw.”
Directed by Susanna White, Woman Walks Ahead will march into theaters at some point in 2017. Miss Sloane, meanwhile, is expected to enter the Oscar race on November 25.
