Jessica Chastain

The pair used their 20-year friendship to their advantage while filming the intimate and raw HBO limited series.

It was a symbolic Jessica, but I wasn’t really taking off my ring. Delish. I would actually raid his dressing room — he had a huge box full of chips, and I would steal them. I thought it was a really smart, Brechtian kind of device. I mean, it was all about her and just what she was doing with Mira. From the very beginning when I read it, it wasn’t so much the character that hooked me in, it was the situations. It was like, “What’s your favorite moment from your wedding?” And so as Mira, I wrote something, and then he wrote something as Jonathan, and we went through the entire journal. What’s it like coming down from a performance, especially something so intense — was this something you could easily shake off when you went home? Everything was coming from her and her character, what she was doing, the way she was responding. And one of the funny things I remember, one question was like, “What’s your most exciting fantasy?” As Mira, I wrote something pretty dirty. And I was so grateful for it and also really relied on the trust that we had with each other. As challenging as that was, being able to do it with Jessica, there was something that strangely felt effortless about it, probably the most effortless of anything I’ve ever done. OSCAR ISAAC I’d seen the original, and so when this came my way, I was really curious about it. I had to re-get to know him because I had to switch things around in my brain to see him as Jonathan.