The Eyes of Tammy Faye: Jessica Chastain’s award-winning performance is worth seeing
Jessica Chastain has been praised for her portrayal – caked in makeup – of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker
Jessica Chastain wanted more time. Production was about to start on The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a biopic reframing the legacy of controversial televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker – a trailblazing media figure whose achievements were overshadowed by the fraud perpetrated by her husband Jim Bakker, played on screen by Andrew Garfield – a film she had shepherded into existence over the course of seven long years.
Chastain purchased the rights to Tammy’s life story in 2012, after watching a documentary that re-examined it through a feminist lens. She didn’t even have a film company yet. But Chastain knew instinctively that she wanted to tell this story of a famous woman brought down by the men in her life at every possible turn.
For seven years, in between making films including Interstellar and Molly’s Game, Chastain quietly worked on The Eyes of Tammy Faye: watching Bakker’s television appearances, reading her books, listening to her records.
Seven years is a long time. Maybe the film won’t get made, Chastain thought. Maybe, after all this, it won’t happen. “There were times when I even tried to sabotage it myself,” she admits, speaking over Zoom from London. “It was such a scary thing … When we got closer to making it, I got terrified.”
When she was told that there wouldn’t be the opportunity to prerecord the music for the film as contracts weren’t yet finalised – Bakker was a chart-topping singer, and the film ends with Chastain in full televangelist tilt, head tipped back and alive with grace – Chastain shrugged it off.
“I was like, that’s OK! We don’t need to do the pre-records,” she says, laughing ruefully. “I was like, if it falls apart, that’s OK. Because I really don’t know if I can do it. I was so scared to play her.”
As the production crept ever closer, the enormity of the task hit home: Chastain was going to have to sing on camera. The 44-year-old would need to play a woman over the span of her life, from bright-eyed university student through to glossy media personality and mother of two, whose heightened hair and makeup became her indelible signature.
Chastain would need prosthetics applied to her cheeks, chin and neck; she would be required to sit in a hair and makeup chair for seven hours each morning to transform into Tammy Faye Bakker. The 2019 start date for the film edged nearer, and Chastain began “begging” producers. “I was like, ‘can I have more time?’,” she recalls. “Please, please give me more time to prep.” Did they? “They gave me three extra days of rehearsal,” Chastain smiles. “And those three days were everything.”
Passion is a powerful force for a creative, but fear even more so. It was terror that fuelled Chastain’s performance, acting through layers and layers of caked-on makeup, false eyelashes, prosthetics and wig, through an accent and a vocal pitch change – listen to clips; Bakker really did sound like that – because the alternative would be to fail in her goal to channel the heart and soul of a figure Chastain believes has been deeply misrepresented.
No surprise, then, that she has been nominated at the Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice and Screen Actors Guild Awards for her compassionate and complex portrayal. “She is so hardworking and prepared,” enthuses The Eyes of Tammy Faye director Michael Showalter. “I mean, the honest truth is she knew the story better than any of us.”
Still, Chastain admits she felt the fear that plagued her in the lead-up to production all throughout making The Eyes of Tammy Faye. “But there were moments I had fun,” she stresses. “It’s like being on a rollercoaster. You’re like, this is terrifying, but also I’m having a little bit of fun here. The more wild it got, the more fun I started to have.”
There was even a point where some wall inside her came down, and Bakker and Chastain felt miraculously intertwined. That surprised her, because “how she presents herself in the world is so different to me,” the actor muses.
She’s sitting on the other side of the Zoom call in a black turtleneck sweater, skin radiant and clear, immaculate bronze hair waved down one shoulder.
On screen, Chastain appears under buckets of foundation and blush, eyes rimmed with kohl and fake eyelashes. But “it got to the point where it felt like there was no effort, and that’s when it felt exciting”, she recalls. “It was so silly, and so joyful, and so easy … It’s a strange thing when that happens as an actor, especially when the character is different. It shouldn’t feel easy. But there were some times on set when it just felt like I was in it.”
That doesn’t always happen on set, she adds, but she has “been lucky” recently. She experienced that rare feeling on both The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Scenes From a Marriage, the HBO miniseries she starred in alongside Oscar Isaac.
The process of applying – and removing – all that hair and makeup was arduous. “It’s a challenge, that’s the reality. You’re wearing a mask,” she says.
“When I’m acting I want to be open to everything, even the temperature of the room – everything – I want to be affected by.”
One side-effect was that it pushed Chastain in ways she hadn’t experienced before.
“The prosthetics and the hair and makeup, which were so extreme, freed me,” she explains. “In my voice, in my laugh, in the way I moved my body. You know when you limit one form of expression, everything else becomes more powerful. I think there’s something in the makeup energetically that I was able to push against that helped her come out even bigger than I thought was possible. For me, I don’t know how I could have played the part without them.”
Key for Showalter was ensuring that even through all the prosthetics, audiences could still see the actor within. “We didn’t want Jessica to get lost or buried inside the makeup,” he says. “Never once did she complain the entire time we were working. I can’t even imagine how uncomfortable she must have felt.”
The Eyes of Tammy Faye slots neatly into Hollywood’s current trend for revisiting cultural moments and reframing them for modern audiences – bonus points if they happen to involve a maligned or misunderstood woman.
The Crown and Spencer tackle the royal family, American Crime Story: Impeachment looked at Monica Lewinsky, Margot Robbie’s I, Tonya offered an alternative perspective on the divisive Tonya Harding.
“I think it all kind of goes to show that we don’t really acknowledge women for who they are,” Chastain reflects.
She thoroughly approves of this genre. “I didn’t really learn about women in history,” she explains, “so a big goal of mine, a big passion of mine (is) to learn about what am I not being told? What history was I fed, and what’s the reality?”
In Bakker’s case, it’s the persistent notion that she must have been involved in her husband Jim’s crimes. (Of which there were many: fraud, conspiracy, adultery. He was jailed in 1989.)
“Why is Tammy lumped in with the mistakes that her husband made, when the reality is that she was never charged with anything? There was no evidence that she did anything wrong,” Chastain asks.
What Chastain sees, when she looks at Bakker’s life, is a woman who was “so punk rock”. “She created three television networks, she recorded over 20 albums … She was a minister in her own right. She was ordained; she wasn’t the wife of a minister, she was ordained,” Chastain enthuses.
And, across her many networks and shows, Bakker “shared everything”, pre-empting our reality TV-obsessed culture by a good two decades. “She invited the cameras into her home on Christmas, her children were raised, in some sense, on camera,” Chastain explains.
“If I knew her now, I would be like, honey, we need to work on some boundaries,” she laughs. “She wanted to give everything of who she was to her audience. To strangers.”
Chastain doesn’t see this trend for revisionism – for reckoning – ending anytime soon.
“We’ve been unfair to women and we really need to right that wrong,” she declares. “And then, when we stop making films like that, that means hopefully we will teach people about women in an appropriate, authentic way.”
When we speak, Chastain has just seen a movie that broke her heart and blew her mind. A film that spoke to all the unspoken parts of womanhood and parenting: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, starring Olivia Colman.
“As I was watching this movie, and I texted her afterwards, I felt melancholy,” Chastain admits.
“Because I was like, oh, if only the past had been more interested in telling women’s stories. Think about all these films that we lost because we didn’t have a system of support for women. Filmmakers like her made me melancholy for all the stories that weren’t told. It just felt like a drink of water that I hadn’t had in so long. You know?” She smiles. “It was so exciting to see that film.”
These are the kinds of stories she wants to continue telling. And maybe even, one day, directing – like Gyllenhaal?
“I don’t think I could direct like Maggie,” Chastain admits. “But maybe someday. We’ll see. It’s quite a commitment. You know, I’m someone who needs a lot of stimulus. I live in New York for a reason; I love the museums, and I love all the different people I get to meet. I love learning about life … It’s kind of why I haven’t signed on to a longer TV show, because I want a lot of different experiences. As a director, you kind of have to just focus for a long time, so, we’ll see.”
Chastain loves to travel: she spent a month in Italy over the European summer where her husband’s family is based, jetted to film festivals in Venice, Cannes, Toronto and London, and longs to get back to Australia, where she once crashed for “quite some time” with friend Michelle Williams and her late partner, Heath Ledger, when Ledger was filming Candy. (“Is there a beach called Tan-arama?” Chastain means Tamarama. “Well, the locals that I hung out with were jokingly calling it Tan-arama,” she laughs.)
She’s currently filming a biopic of singer Tammy Wynette, and has a true crime drama with Eddie Redmayne on the cards.
Directing might have to wait. For now, she’s happy to be the actor working with the director, especially in the tightly knit pods necessitated by continuing waves of the pandemic, which are “kind of like how I imagined filmmaking was in the ’70s”, Chastain says.
“I mean, everyone has their own romantic vision of when they were making films with Meryl and Al Pacino, like a little intimate group working with Mike Nichols or whatnot, and I would love that experience. Because it feels like sometimes you can get swallowed up by a film set. There’s so many people there … and it feels very …” Chastain pauses. “Presentational, sometimes.”
As with so many things, the pandemic has scaled filmmaking back, and the experience is “more intense” and “personal” now.
“It really feels like it makes the work more intimate,” Chastain reflects. “For me, I embrace it. I love it! I hope that we can hang on to that as we start going into normal life.”
The Eyes of Tammy Faye is in cinemas on January 27.