Jessica Chastain Pitches Idea for ‘The Help’ Sequel with Octavia Spencer: ‘How Amazing Would That Film Be?’

Jessica Chastain wants to extend the fun she had making The Help with costar Octavia Spencer.

The actress said on Entertainment Weekly‘s Awardist podcast (recorded prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike) that she has an idea for a sequel to the 2011 movie, which was based on a novel from 2009.

“You know who I think about all the time and I just wish I could play her [again]? Celia Foote. I just want to do something, Celia and Minny, and see what happened,” she said of her and Spencer’s characters.

Chastain added, “You know they ended up living together and raising the baby together, they were best friends. How amazing would that film be?”

“I loved her, and I got to be a bit silly,” the actress said of the role.

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Jessica Chastain, Octavia Spencer, Ahna O’Reilly and Emma Stone in 2012.

Jeff Kravitz/Film

Both Chastain and Spencer, 53, scored Oscar nominations in the Best Supporting Actress category for the film; Spencer won the award. The film also starred Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sissy Spacek, Allison Janney and Cicely Tyson.

“A lot of my characters I feel like I got to experience a lot,” said Chastain. “Celia, it was such a deep dive for me. I really threw on that character and I didn’t really get to mine that much material, because I was a supporting part of that story. That’s a character I wish I could revisit.”

The Help was a box office hit at the time, but in recent years, critics — and its own cast members — have spoken out about how it centers the plot on White voices in a story meant to be about the experience of Black maids in Mississippi.

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Jessica Chastain in June 2023.

Theo Wargo/Getty Images

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Davis told Vanity Fair in 2020, “There’s no one who’s not entertained by The Help. But there’s a part of me that feels like I betrayed myself, and my people, because I was in a movie that wasn’t ready to [tell the whole truth].”

The Oscar winner previously opened up about regretting her role in The Help in a 2018 interview with The New York Times.

“I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard,” Davis said at the time. “I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom. And I know that if you do a movie where the whole premise is, I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963, I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie.”

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Source: HIS Education