Jessica Chastain and Liv Ullmann – Same Role, 48 Years Apart

Jessica Chastain reprises Liv Ullmann’s part in the Ingmar Bergman classic Scenes From a Marriage. Their approaches couldn’t be more different.

- By Rachel Handler

Jessica Chastain and Liv Ullmann are cheerfully arguing about monogamy. The two women—who first met when Ullmann, 82, directed Chastain, 44, in 2014’s Miss Julie—have reunited in the name of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage, the critically acclaimed 1973 miniseries starring Ullmann and Erland Josephson, which was blamed for destroying thousands of previously happy Swedish marriages. This month, Chastain and Oscar Isaac will viscerally dismantle their own fictional marriage, and perhaps the sacred unions of HBO subscribers the world over, in a remake of the series written and directed by Hagai Levi.

Levi has taken Bergman’s premise— Johan (Josephson), a haughty professor, cheats on and leaves divorce lawyer Marianne (Ullmann), who is stunned but slowly finds a sort of liberation in her solitude— and turned it on its head. Chastain’s dissociated tech exec, Mira, is the one who has the affair, leaving Isaac’s forlorn work-from-home father, Jonathan, to pick up the pieces. Chastain and Ullmann can’t quite seem to agree on a few key themes addressed in the series. Forty-eight years after the original aired, Ullmann is still aghast at her character’s decision to have a later-in-life affair with her ex-husband—“In our version, I hated it!” she says—while Chastain sees it as “free love,” something pure and beyond moral reproach. (The disconnect may be related to Ullmann’s deeply personal connection to the story: Before filming Scenes, she was in a serious, yearslong relationship with Bergman, which he drew upon while writing his script.) The two actresses also wildly disagree about the end of Henrik Ibsen’s