EXCLUSIVE: Jessica Chastain is in talks to star with Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway in Interstellar, the next film that Christopher Nolan will direct. She will play the third lead, I’m told, and this is a great follow to her Oscar-nominated turn in Zero Dark Thirty. Quite a cast Nolan is cooking up; Hathaway won the Oscar for Les Miserables, and McConaughey is on a run himself. Not much is known about the specific log line (Nolan and cohorts work under the cone of silence) and that includes casting. I was able to break the news about McConaughey (he confirmed it a week later), and also Hathaway. The film is a co-production between Paramount and Warner Bros and was put in motion by Lynda Obst, who commissioned the original treatment. Steven Spielberg came aboard in 2006, when Paramount owned DreamWorks, and after the filmmaker became intrigued by Caltech physicist and relativity expert Kip S. Thorne and his scientific theory that wormholes exist and can be used for time travel. Spielberg set Jonah Nolan to write the script, which made it easy for Christopher Nolan to come aboard after Spielberg left the project. After all, the Nolan siblings have a collaborative track record, with Jonah hatching the short story that became Christopher’s first hit, 2000′s Memento, and following that with two Batfilms and The Prestige. Christopher Nolan signed on in January to write a script that merged an original idea of his with the script that Jonah wrote. The ambition is a film that will depict a heroic interstellar voyage to the farthest borders of our scientific understanding. Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas are producing with Lynda Obst. Jordan Goldberg is joining as exec producer alongside Thorne, who’ll remain on as technical consultant. CAA and Mosaic rep Chastain.

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