Exclusive: Jessica Chastain Starring In True Story About Mom Who Stops Mass Shootings
Now, Giant Freakin Robot hears that she's about to play the role of an unsung hero. One of our trusted and proven inside sources has shared that Jessica Chastain is set to star in...
Update: This Giant Freakin Robot exclusive was confirmed, and Jessica Chastain is starring in The Savant on AppleTV+. It is based on “Is It Possible to Stop a Mass Shooting Before It Happens?” The series also includes Nnamdi Asomugha and James Badge Dale.
Jessica Chastain is no stranger to bringing real-life figures to the screen. She played an FBI target in Molly’s Game and a televangelist in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Now, Giant Freakin Robot hears that she’s about to play the role of an unsung hero. One of our trusted and proven inside sources has shared that Jessica Chastain is set to star in The Savant, where she will tell the true story of a woman secretly working to stop mass shootings.
Details known about the real-life figure were first revealed in a 2019 article from Cosmopolitan. Her actual name is unknown, but in the article, she went by K, or, The Savant. Jessica Chastain will be playing the lead role.
From what’s known about the true story of K, it sounds like The Savant will see Jessica Chastain living one life as a mom and wife with neighbors, friends, and family. Meanwhile, she’ll balance her identity as a secret investigator stopping mass shootings. Specifically, she goes into online groups discovering shooters before they take that step. The article shares that her job has shifted in recent years. She’s been “pulled toward the alt-right, a younger, more misogynistic version of the white supremacist movement that’s converting a new generation on message boards and social media. She is tracking the men who hate women.”
The original article about K and her work was full of mystery, but so is the woman’s life. The Cosmopolitan article was written after a reporter was able to spend 96 hours with her, asking about her life and what she does. We were unable to learn whether the writers behind the new Jessica Chastain project were able to spend time with K on their own. It seems most likely that all they had to go on was the information in the article. It’ll be interesting to see how they use that to create their new fictionalized project. K has a fascinating job, but in the article, it’s not portrayed as one that would be easy to tell on screen.
The article’s original title was Is It Possible To Stop A Mass Shooting Before It Happens? The story then followed The Savant as she “spends her days and nights infiltrating the angriest extremist networks in the country.” She does this online, and her friends and family don’t actually know what she does. In the article, Jessica Chastain’s character says that she tells them she is a researcher on domestic terrorism and that she believes they assume she works for some kind of think tank. Her job is dangerous, so she doesn’t want them to know too many details of her work as a secret investigator.
It will be interesting to see how The Savant tells her story. Will the series largely show screenshots of her computer screen? Will Jessica Chastain need to change the story some and have her chasing down shooters in person? It seems highly possible that in The Savant, at some point, other characters could be introduced to show the shooters’ real-life actions. It also seems likely that the series will take creative liberties and that shooters may discover her identity, since that’s something K worried about in her article. It’ll definitely be interesting to see how the new project handles Jessica Chastain as a mom and a woman who appears to simply be sitting behind a computer but is secretly tackling such an important, risky, and life-saving task.
