A Blonde Bob at CityWalk, Jessica Chastain Premieres Other Mommy

CityWalk is built for spectacle, all neon and noise, and on Thursday night it had a new monster to show off. Jessica Chastain arrived at the Universal Cinema AMC at CityWalk Hollywood on Thursday, October 8, for what Associated Press photo captions called the premiere of Other Mommy, the Universal horror film in which she plays a mother and the thing that wears her face.

She came as neither. Chastain wore a green Monse mini dress and a short blonde bob, Just Jared reported, a long way from the red hair that has followed her through most of her career. Photographs by Jordan Strauss for Invision, distributed by the Associated Press, show her arriving alongside Jason Blum and her co-star Jay Duplass, and in a second frame with director Rob Savage, Duplass and Arabella Olivia Clark, the young actor who plays her daughter.

Just Jared described the night as a fan screening. Universal held Other Mommy back from most critics until the last minute, with previews in New York and Los Angeles on Thursday night before the Friday opening, The Hollywood Reporter noted. By Friday, October 9, the film was in theaters across the country.

The Thing in the Closet

The setup is simple and nasty. Bela, an 8-year-old played by Clark, is already living through her parents’ marital trouble when a sinister presence emerges from her closet, Collider explained. It looks exactly like her mother, so Bela calls it Other Mommy. Chastain plays both the mother and the entity, and Duplass plays the father.

The film is based on Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House and directed by Savage, whose earlier films include Host, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It is a Blumhouse and Atomic Monster production released by Universal, and Savage has said it holds around 50 jump scares, which The Hollywood Reporter worked out to roughly one every two minutes.

A Decision Made Over a Weekend

Chastain did not have long to think about it. She told Collider that the offer arrived at the end of a week and the clock was already running.

“This one, it was complicated because they said it to me on a Friday, and I had to make the decision by Monday morning, because if I did it, they had to move production up to fit into this slot,” she said.

She read the script, then called Savage. She said she found him intelligent and steeped in film history, and that he was open to her ideas for some of what her character says at the end of the film. “I was really, really excited to sign on because I believed in Rob, and he didn’t prove me wrong. He’s made a great film,” she told Collider. The timing mattered for another reason. Chastain said she was in school, working on a master’s degree in public administration, and is now on leave from it.

The part of the film that has traveled furthest online is a face, the entity’s eerie, friendly stare. Duplass told Collider that the filmmakers had expected to build it with effects or makeup. “It’s the face. It’s the face that they thought they might do something to digitally or with makeup or whatever, and when Jessica did it herself, they realized they didn’t need to do anything to it, that it was the scariest one,” he said.

Chastain said the look began inside the character rather than in a mirror. “The funny thing is, it doesn’t start external. It all starts from what is the character, what creates it,” she said. She described a creature straining to hold on to a borrowed skin while trying to seem friendly to a child, which led her to a friendly expression that perhaps never blinks, because there is something inhuman about that.

Asked where she likes to sit in a cinema, she had a clear answer.

I want a large movie theater with a lot of people in it, and middle.

Horror Has Been Kind to Her

The genre has a track record with her. Her first film with director Andy Muschietti, Mama in 2013, opened to $28.4 million domestically for Universal and finished with $71.6 million in North America and $146.4 million worldwide, Deadline reported. Their second, It Chapter Two in 2019, opened to $91 million in North America and finished at $211.6 million in the United States and $473.1 million worldwide.

Other Mommy is a smaller bet. Deadline put its net production cost at $19 million and said the R-rated film was eyeing a No. 1 debut of around $20 million from 3,200 locations this weekend, with premium large format screens on its side. The campaign began on July 17, when the first trailer played in theaters ahead of The Odyssey, and the online trailer has been viewed 242 million times worldwide, according to Deadline.

The early word has been rough. The first reactions gathered by The Hollywood Reporter were mostly negative and ran from a 4 out of 5 to a 1.5 out of 5. Goldwin Reviews was enthusiastic, while The Jam Report and Global Box Office called the jump scares ineffective or failed. The Hollywood Reporter still expected the film to lead the weekend box office, opening to an estimated $20 million.

From Red to Blonde

The bob has been part of the press tour too. Chastain debuted a strawberry blonde bob at the U.S. Open in September, then appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday, October 7, with a more platinum hue, Parade reported. She told Kimmel that people now seem surprised when she is a little sassier than usual, as if they expect her to be soft and demure.

She also explained where the idea came from. Chastain said she had worn a wig in a very similar color for three months while filming The Off Weeks, an upcoming limited series with Ben Stiller for Apple TV, and decided to make it permanent. In an interview with Porter magazine, she said she had never dyed her hair before. “It feels good to be a blonde,” she said.

Chastain is not staying in horror for long. She told Collider she was about to start filming My Darling California, the next film from Elijah Bynum, who made Magazine Dreams. Duplass, meanwhile, plays director John Avildsen in Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky, a film about the making of the original Rocky.

Other Mommy is rated R and is now playing in theaters. Showtimes and tickets are on Universal’s film page.