Jessica Chastain Talks Baby Advice & Regret Over Not Meeting Robin Williams (Exclusive)

Jessica Chastain and Nnamdi Asomugha are dishing on their new crime thriller “The Savant.”

“Extra’s” Derek Hough spoke with Jessica and Nnamdi about the miniseries, which is based on a real woman. In it, Jessica plays a top-secret undercover investigator who infiltrates online hate groups to stop extremists before they act. 

Jessica talked about how she always looks for interesting female characters to play, saying, “I especially look for something that kind of goes against any type of expectation of how a female character should be in a story… I like to go against the status quo of what we expect.”

Nnamdi spoke about how the show resonated with him as a father of three. 

He said, “We’ve got this information of all this terrible stuff that’s going on that she’s trying to protect everyone from and we’re trying to protect that from our kids in the show. We don’t want them to know exactly what’s going on. The interesting thing for me is coming home from work, I’m getting the questions of, ‘So, what’s the show about that you’re doing?’ You know what I mean? And being able to sort of navigate, ‘Okay, how much do I say in the same way that the character had to?’ I thought that was really interesting how life was imitating art.”

Asomugha stressed, “It’s very important, I think, we talk about devices, right? And, like, the guardrails and the things we need to put on those devices for kids.”

Derek is about to become a first-time dad himself, and Jessica shared her best piece of baby advice as a mom of two!

When Jessica found out that Derek’s baby is due in December, she commented, “You’re going to have a Christmas with the best Christmas present ever.”

Chastain called parenthood “the best thing,” but her advice was “Get a SNOO.”

She explained, “A SNOO is a bed for babies. It kind of, like, mimics the womb. So, it makes the sound like a womb. If the baby starts to cry, it helps the baby sleep… It’s constantly moving… Then, when the baby cries, it moves more and then the baby stops crying.”

Jessica loves the SNOO so much that she’s “bought it for all of [her] friends who have had kids.”

She emphasized, “You’re gonna sleep a lot more.”

Jessica, who received a life-changing Juilliard scholarship funded by the late Robin Williams, recalled a missed opportunity to meet the movie legend that she regrets. 

She said, “My friends worked with him, and I sent him letters and a thank-you card… There was one time I was in a restaurant, and it was like a director’s meeting. It was many years ago, and I was telling [the director] this story, the Robin Williams scholarship, and no joke, he walked into the restaurant and sat down at, like, a table next to me that was already filled with people and started eating. I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ He goes, ‘Now’s your chance — go meet him,’ and I was like, ‘Okay, but I’m going to wait until he finishes eating ’cause I don’t want to interrupt his meal,’ and then he must have been running late for something... He jumped up and ran out of the restaurant, so I jumped up and I was going to start to chase after him and then I thought, ‘That’s not very nice. I don’t want to, like, chase down this man, who’s clearly late.’”

She went on, “And I always regret it ’cause I never got the opportunity to meet him, so now I tell people if you ever see me at a restaurant or whatever, come over and say hi.’”