We last saw her as the lethal Lucille Sharpe in Crimson Peak, but Jessica Chastain is after a more humane role for a future project. She's making a deal to star as a real-life activist in Woman Walks Ahead.
Locke's Steven Knight is writing the script and Susanna White is directing the story of Caroline Weldon, a woman from Brooklyn in the 19th century who moved to a Native American reservation in the Dakotas to help Sioux chieftain Sitting Bull fight to keep his people's land out of the grasp of the government. Despite vilification and mockery from the press, who labelled her "Sitting Bull's White Squaw", she kept up her campaign, writing constantly to the federal government and eventually living on the land for years with her son.
The story has been waiting for its cinematic moment for several years, and Starter For Ten's Tom Vaughn was previously attached to make it. But now, with IM Global touting the rights at the European Film Market in Berlin, it looks set to finally become reality.
Chastain will next be seen in The Huntsman: Winter's War, which arrives here on April 8.