Chastain received further acclaim for playing strong-willed women in the dramas A Most Violent Year (2014), Miss Sloane (2016), and Molly's Game (2017), and the television miniseries Scenes from a Marriage (2021).

[18] Shortly before graduating from Juilliard, Chastain attended an event for final-year students in Los Angeles, where she was signed to a talent holding deal by the television producer John Wells.

[21] Later that year, she appeared as a guest performer on the medical drama series ER playing a woman she described as "psychotic", which led to her getting more unusual parts such as accident victims or characters with mental illness.

[22] In 2004, Chastain took on the role of Anya, a virtuous young woman, in a Williamstown Theatre Festival production of Anton Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard in Massachusetts, starring with Michelle Williams.

[31][32] Also in 2009, she played the part of Desdemona in The Public Theatre production of Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, co-starring John Ortiz as the title character and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago.

[34] In 2010, Chastain starred in John Madden's dramatic thriller The Debt, portraying a young Mossad agent sent to East Berlin in the 1960s to capture a former Nazi doctor who carried out medical experiments in concentration camps.

[19][38] The first of the roles was as the wife of Michael Shannon's character in Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter, a drama about a troubled father who tries to protect his family from what he believes is an impending storm.

[43] She considered her part to be "the embodiment of grace and the spirit world"; in preparation, she practiced meditation, studied paintings of the Madonna, and read poems by Thomas Aquinas.

[44] The critic Justin Chang termed the film a "hymn to the glory of creation, an exploratory, often mystifying [...] poem" and credited Chastain for playing her part with "heartrending vulnerability".

[45] Chastain's biggest success of the year came with the drama The Help, co-starring Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Emma Stone, which was based on Kathryn Stockett's novel of the same name.

Chastain was drawn to Foote's antiracist stand, and connected with her energy and enthusiasm; in preparation, she watched the films of Marilyn Monroe and researched the history of Tunica, Mississippi, where her character was raised.

[7][50][51] Chastain's final two roles of the year were in Wilde Salomé, a documentary based on her 2006 production of Salome,[52] and the critically panned crime-thriller Texas Killing Fields.

[74] She then starred as the titular character of a depressed woman who separates from her husband (played by James McAvoy) following a tragic incident in the drama The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2013), which she also produced.

[90] Mark Kermode of The Observer found Chastain to be "terrific" in a part inspired by Lady Macbeth's character, and Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle described her portrayal as "the embodiment of a nouveau riche New York woman of the era".

Starring Matt Damon as a botanist who is stranded on Mars by a team of astronauts commanded by Chastain's character, the film is based on Andy Weir's novel of the same name.

Chastain met with astronauts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Johnson Space Center, and modeled her role on Tracy Caldwell Dyson, with whom she spent time in Houston.

[48][96] Chastain next starred as a woman who plots with her brother (Tom Hiddleston) to terrorize his new bride (Mia Wasikowska) in Guillermo del Toro's gothic romance Crimson Peak.

[95] Del Toro cast Chastain to lend accessibility to a part he considered "psychopathic", but Peter Debruge of Variety found her "alarmingly miscast" and criticized her for failing to effectively convey her character's insecurity and ruthlessness.

[102] Hailing her as "one of the best actresses on the planet", Peter Travers commended Chastain for successfully drawing the audience into Sloane's life, and Justin Chang termed her performance "a tour de force of rhetorical precision and tightly coiled emotional intensity".

[107] In an effort to work with more female filmmakers, Chastain starred in two projects directed by women — Niki Caro's The Zookeeper's Wife and Susanna White's Woman Walks Ahead.

[108] In the former, an adaptation of Diane Ackerman's non-fiction book of the same name, she co-starred with Johan Heldenbergh as the real-life Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Żabiński who saved many human and animal lives during World War II.

[110][111] Woman Walks Ahead tells the story of the 19th-century activist Catherine Weldon, who served as an adviser to the Sioux chieftain Sitting Bull prior to the Wounded Knee Massacre.

[115] In 2018, she hosted an episode of the television sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live and voiced the virtual reality production Spheres: Songs of Spacetime.

[118] In the superhero film Dark Phoenix (2019), which marked the twelfth installment in the X-Men series, Chastain took on the role of an evil alien due to its focus on female characters.

Filming proved challenging for Chastain, as Muschietti preferred the usage of practical effects to computer-generated imagery; one particular scene required her to be covered in 4,500 US gallons (17,000 litres) of fake blood.

[136][137] Also in 2021, Chastain agreed to Scenes from a Marriage, a gender-switched remake of Ingmar Bergman's 1973 Swedish miniseries of the same name for HBO, for its subversion of stereotypical portrayal of women.

[138][139] Lucy Mangan of The Guardian took note of the chemistry between Chastain and her co-star Oscar Isaac, as did Carol Midgley of The Times who praised them for "delivering crackling, wounding dialogue faultlessly".

[190] In 2013, Chastain lent her support to the Got Your 6 campaign, to help empower veterans of the United States Army, and in 2016, she became an advisory-board member to the organization We Do It Together, which produces films and television shows to promote women empowerment.

[209] Describing her film career in 2017, Ben Dickinson of Elle wrote:With her often haunted-looking eyes, pale complexion, and gorgeous red mane [...] she can project everything from icy hauteur (The Martian, Miss Sloane) to loving warmth (The Tree of Life, The Zookeeper's Wife) or an unstable equilibrium and high intelligence in between (Zero Dark Thirty and A Most Violent Year).

[210]The journalist Tom Shone describes Chastain as being "excessively luscious [with] pale Botticelli features wrapped around a bone structure that has a touch of the masculine, right down to the cleft in her chin.