Jessica Chastain says friendship with Oscar Isaac hasn't 'been the same' since Scenes From a Marriage

Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac are such good actors that they genuinely shook up their long-standing friendship playing bitter lovers in Scenes From a Marriage. 

"Scenes From a Marriage was very tough. And I love Oscar [Isaac], but the reality is, our friendship has never quite been the same," Chastain admitted in a recent Vanity Fair interview. "We're going to be okay, but after that, I was like, I need a little bit of a breather. There was so much I love you, I hate you in that series."

Chastain and Isaac, who have been close pals since attending Juilliard Drama School together, starred as husband Jonathan and wife Mira in the 2021 HBO remake of Ingmar Bergman's 1973 television miniseries. Over the course of the show, their marriage begins to slowly unravel as infidelity, heartbreak, and resentment blossoms between them.

Jojo Whilden/HBO Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac play an upper-middle-class couple whose union unravels in HBO's 'Scenes From a Marriage'

The actress previously revealed that she and Isaac both tapped into their friendship in order to really get under each other's skin while filming.

"We've been friends for more than half our lives and we know so much about each other," she told the TODAY show in 2021. "So we know how to make each other laugh without even saying anything. We can almost read each other's minds but, it also means we could hurt each other really strongly. In the scenes, we would know how to get to the other one."

And that includes a perfectly-timed barbed comment or two.

"Sometimes before action, I would turn to Oscar, who plays the main caregiver of our child, and be like, 'The house looks really really messy. Why didn't you clean it?'" She recalled at the time. "And he was like, 'Grr.' We know how to dig in."

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