Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne’s serial killer movie ‘Good Nurse’ examines U.S. health care system
In the early 1980s, while studying at Columbia University, Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne read Margaret Fuller’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as part of their course on the making of modern art. The two of them were so inspired by her ideas on the importance of art being produced in the service of the modern world that they would go on to form a film company named Aftermath Productions.
The result of their work was a short experimental film called “Good Nurse,” which they wrote together under the names Jessica Chastain and Redmayne. Chastain had gone to Princeton. Redmayne was an art student. They wanted to create a film that would be like a comic, but with a plot much more complex than an issue of The New Yorker.
Both films have their own interesting characters: Chastain plays a hospital nurse; Redmayne plays an artist turned murderer. But they also have a common goal in mind: to create a story that would explain how modern medicine is failing us.
Chastain was born in Oklahoma City in 1975. Her father was a professor of political science at Oklahoma State University, and her mother, Chastain said, was from Tulsa. She spent most of her childhood in Oklahoma City and graduated from the high school there. She played softball on the high school team. It was during those years that she first explored the idea of becoming an actress.
Chastain dropped out of school and moved to New York City for a few years. She worked at a bookstore in the East Village. She says the bookstore was where she first encountered a world that was filled with ideas, whether those ideas were true or not.
“I’d go home and ask my parents about [the] world. I’d go home and ask them questions about the world,” she said. “It was a world of ideas. People were always going to be like, ‘Well, you know, your father was wrong. Well, your mother was wrong.’ We’re always going to be like that.”
Chastain got her first break early on, when she won a
