Jessica Chastain has said she plastered her trailer with pictures of the Kardashian sisters as inspiration for her latest film role.

The star plays “poker princess” Molly Bloom, the real-life woman who once ran the biggest card game in the world, in Molly’s Game, the directorial debut of The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin.

The film details the gender politics Bloom battled with and contrasts her public notoriety with her private morality.

Chastain said: “I had the same preconceptions that Aaron had, I googled her and then I noticed I was starting to have this judgment against her.

“I was watching some interviews and I saw some journalists not be so nice to her and I was thinking ‘what her goal is in all of this?’ and then I realised that the media was conditioning me to feel that way.

“What we do is – a woman is most valuable for her sexual attractiveness and then the media tears her down afterwards.

“For me it was very much a Kardashian story, I had pictures of the Kardashians all over my trailer.

“It was a sense of who are the most powerful women in our society, in this society we live in and how did they get their power?

“And for me it was the Kardashians.”

Sorkin added: “I think I knew it was going to be about gender politics before I started writing it, just talking to Molly.

“It occurred to me in hour 73 of talking to Molly – what if every woman in the course of her life meets five rotten guys and what if those were the first five men she met, she met them all in a row?

“It would kind of knock you a certain way. So I was thinking that when I was writing it.

“I was certainly also thinking that she had to navigate a world of very powerful men, men who if they felt that Molly wasn’t paying sufficient respect to their power or Molly was paying more attention to someone else than she was paying to them, they had to finish her, they had to ruin her.”

Molly’s Game is released in UK cinemas on January 1.