JESSICA CHASTAIN

The two-time Oscar-nominated actress for Zero Dark Thirty and The Help, 44, stars as the late evangelist and media personality Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye (in theaters Sept. 17). The biopic traces Bakker’s life from her humble beginnings to meeting minister-to-be Jim Bakker and building a mega-broadcast network—and the scandal that led to their downfall.

What does the movie’s title mean? What she sees and how she sees the world is perhaps different than someone else.

What made you want to tell this story? Who she was and how it conflicted with my perception really drew me to the project. When I first watched the interview she gave with [pastor] Steve Pieters [in the mid-1980s, in which Bakker expressed her support for AIDS victims], I started figuring out how to make a movie.

Where do you think her obsession with makeup and expensive clothes began? Having read her books, I never thought of her as being vain. In fact, the opposite; I think of her as being a very creative person. She put her creativity into creating looks for herself.

Was Tammy Faye a strong woman or just a big personality? I think every woman is a strong woman. Yeah, she had a very big personality, but I think it takes a very strong woman to create what she created and to really make a space for herself. To be a minister’s wife was purely just to be the wife. Tammy Faye was a minister in her own right. She recorded multiple albums, wrote a lot of books and created three huge Christian television networks. I see her as a very strong woman.