Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty ImagesJessica Chastain has always aired on the conservative side when it comes to discussing her personal life, but in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, she shares an unknown fact from her past.
"Nobody knows this about me. I dropped out of high school," the 37-year-old actress reveals. "I was not a hard worker. I was a terrible student. Eventually I got my adult diploma, but I did not graduate. And it wasn't that I just dropped out and never went back—at the end of the year I had too many absences to graduate."
The two-time Oscar nominated actress was not your typical teen, "I would cut school and sit in my car, reading Shakespeare," she reveals, but her passion for acting never wavered, and after starring in a 1998 Bay Area production of Romeo & Juliet, she auditioned for the prestigious Julliard School in New York City and was accepted at age 22.
"I got to Juilliard and I'd never been around literature like that," she recalls. "It completely opened me up."
The funding for Chastain's tuition was famously provided thanks to a scholarship created by the late Robin Williams, whose "legacy" Chastain hopes to continue to honor.
As for the message she would like her fans to take away from her high school dropout story?
"I thought that I wasn't an intelligent person because I did so poorly," she explains. "There are kids out there that aren't doing well in school—and I hope they never think it means they're stupid. It's all about finding where your interest lies and finding what you're good at."
Safe to say these fellow celebs share the same sentiments.