Jessica Chastain on her new film about Washington lobbyists, Miss Sloane
Miss Sloane does for political lobbyists what another film, Michael Clayton, did for lawyers - laying bare the ruthless and murky world they operate in and the lengths they will go to for clients
Right now, with the daily soap opera that is the first days of the Trump administration, any movie or television show set in Washington might be struggling to keep up. The new series of Showtime’s Homeland, with its female president-elect, was evidently banking on Hillary Clinton being installed in the White House. Even the upcoming season of House of Cards, with Kevin Spacey’s Machiavellian President Francis Underwood, is liable to seem tame in comparison to Trump’s antics.
Wisely, John Madden’s new political movie Miss Sloane doesn’t head straight for the Oval Office. Instead, it dips into the murky world of lobbyists, doing for them what Michael Clayton did for lawyers.
Operatives whose business it is to influence legislation, policy or governmental decisions on behalf of the individual or group who hires them, lobbyists are “sewn very deeply into the fabric of the way Washington works”, says the British-born Madden, who admits he’s “always been a bit of a nut for American politics”.
Still, it’s a rarefied world that most of us know little about. Certainly that was the case for Madden’s star, Jessica Chastain, who previously worked with the director on his 2010 film The Debt. Here, she plays Elizabeth Sloane, a ruthless, workaholic lobbyist who gets embroiled in the debate surrounding gun control.
“No one really says, ‘I want to be a lobbyist when I grow up,’” she says. “You never really hear of that profession.”
