Jessica Chastain stars as an operative who goes undercover to infiltrate hate groups online, preventing extremist acts of violence before they happen
Jodi Goodwin is a suburban mom with a job so nebulous even her own children can’t describe it. “We think she’s in the CIA,” jokes Jodi’s teenage daughter, but even she is convinced what her mother does behind locked doors, in a shed in the garden, is “boring tech stuff.” The truth about Jodi, a former U.S. Marine and police officer who now spends most of her time in a virtual reality, is that she is attempting to prevent hate-fuelled acts of domestic terrorism before they happen.
When Jessica Chastain came across Andrea Stanley’s article in Cosmopolitan about a woman living in an undisclosed location in the U.S., infiltrating online chat rooms to identify plots of violence by pretending to be one of the perpetrators, the Academy Award-winner was immediately intrigued. “I was moved that these people existed,” says Chastain. “I didn’t know that there was a group of people that work behind the scenes and spend so much of their time infiltrating these hate groups, adapting these avatars and working almost like an undercover cop to stop plots of violence from happening. It gave me a lot of hope, and it made me feel safer. How many acts of violence would’ve happened had they not been there protecting us?”
As both star and producer of the tense eight-episode series, Chastain was able to meet with the real-life Jodi. “I was giving her a lot of compliments and thanking her for her service, and she was brushing everything off,” recalls Chastain. “Every time I tried to bestow on her admiration, she was like, ‘Oh, it’s not a big deal, what I do.’ I realized that is very important for Jodi. She doesn’t want to be called the Savant, and she doesn’t want to understand the weight of what she does. She doesn’t want to live in it, she just wants to do it. She doesn’t want to talk about the changes she’s making. She just wants to move forward and help people. I took away that [from meeting her].”
The truth, of course, is that pretending to be a white supremacist is emotionally taxing. Onscreen, at least, the secrecy has consequences, not just for Jodi —who worries for the safety of her colleagues and her family — but for her children, who start acting out after subconsciously absorbing some of the stress. For Chastain, it wasn’t hard to understand the toll the work takes on her character. “Jodi’s work is very similar to what we do as actors, where we have to put on an avatar of a person who has completely different beliefs than us, oftentimes, and try to think how they would navigate in the world,” says Chastain. “It’s really important to have a separation. It’s difficult for me because, when I’m acting, it affects me and I know it costs me something. When I am working on a complex, dark character, someone exposed to a lot of trauma, there is an emotional cost. For Jodi, she’s been playing this avatar for 10 years. At a certain point it’s like, where does she end and where does the avatar begin?”
As the adults on set, Chastain and her co-star Nnamdi Asomugha, who plays Jodi’s Army medic husband Charlie, tried to be protective of actors Trinity Lee Shirley and Toussaint Francois Battiste, who play their children. But it was their two young co-stars who ended up teaching them about compartmentalization. “I underestimated how helpful the kids would be,” says Chastain. “A lot of the scenes the kids did had some heavy stuff that they had to do, and I was nervous about it. We were always aware of them, like, ‘Are they OK?’ if there was a line that they were saying that was very heavy. But the moment you say cut, they’re out of it and they’re off doing something else, and then we started to get out of it. It helped us to not be so heavy on set.”
While the show highlights how easy it is to spread hate these days, especially with the internet as an amplifier, Chastain believes The Savant serves as proof that there is more in life to be optimistic about than the opposite. “Let’s focus on the people that are helping,” she says. “Yes, there is a lot of hate, but I do think, actually, that there’s more love than there is hate. Sometimes you see comments that just feel so horrible and hate-filled, but then you go, ‘OK, well how many is that? And why does that, even though it’s a small amount, affect me more than the comments that are loving?’ I think we just have to turn our focus, because I do think we’re inherently good. And there are people out there making great sacrifices, like Jodi.”
The Savant, streaming Friday, October 3, on Apple TV+