The Eyes of Tammy Faye star Jessica Chastain joined makeup department head Linda Dowds and prosthetics designer Justin Raleigh for a virtual panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event.
Chastain stars as Tammy Faye Bakker in the biographical drama directed by Michael Showalter. The Searchlight Pictures film tracks the rise and fall of Tammy Faye’s televangelist career as she and her husband Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) go from creating the PTL network to Jim being arrested for felony charges of accounting fraud.
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In one of the scenes from the film, Tammy Faye interviews Steve Pieters, an openly gay minister with AIDS, during a time where religious figures were against the LGBTQ+ community.
“Tammy Faye is about unconditional love and loving without judgment,” Chastain said. “I grew up in the ’80s and I remember how much homophobia and fear that there was. And for Tammy to bring someone like Steve Pieters onto her show, who is an openly gay minister with AIDS, and tell her audience, ‘We need to put our arms around them and tell them that we care,’ was a radical act of love, and I wanted to tell that story separate from the gossipy headlines.”
Since Chastain doesn’t look like Tammy Faye, her hair and makeup team had an interesting challenge with the transformation. “There are three major stages of prosthetic work,” Raleigh said. “Our goal was to keep something that remained consistent, remained true to Tammy, but allowed enough of Jessica to come through and allow her to create this amazing performance without being completely bogged down by the prosthetics.”
Tammy Faye was known for her larger-than-life presence, but it was important that her image wasn’t taken to an extreme. “We see so much of her in that caricature thing we see on late-night television,” says Dowds, “but we always wanted to show her as the beautiful human being she was.”
Check out the panel video above.
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