Jessica Chastain redeems a televangelist in ‘Tammy Faye’
NEW YORK » In the nearly 10 years it took for Jessica Chastain to get made a film about the Christian televangelist Tammy Faye Messner, she studied many of the kinds of things you’d expect — the hours of television footage, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s 2000 documentary. But one of the most revelatory sources was a largely forgotten WB reality show from 2002.
By then, Messner had fallen from the heights of her televangelist fame after scandals brought down the multimillion-dollar ministry she and her longtime husband, Jim Bakker, built with the PTL (“Praise the Lord”) Network. So there she was on “The Surreal Life” alongside Dlist celebrities like Vanilla Ice and adult film star Ron
Jeremy, living in a Hollywood Hills mansion for two weeks.
“You’re thinking: What is this? I know they put her in there because they thought it would create a lot of drama. But it was a beautiful thing to watch,” says Chastain. “You saw her consistently being who she was, not judging anyone, but ministering to them.”
To Chastain, what stood out was Messner’s steadiness of faith. As much as the highly coiffed, heavily made-up televangelist’s appearance fluctuated over the years, Messner — whose finest moment may have been a 1985 show talking to gay minister and AIDS activist Steve Pieters about HIV — preached God’s love to everyone. Even Vanilla Ice. He later wrote a song about her.
“She just loved everyone,
and she loved without judgment and she believed everyone was deserving of God’s grace,” Chastain said in a recent interview. “Now I wasn’t baptized. But I think that’s supposed to be what Christianity is about.”
In “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” directed by Michael Showalter, which Searchlight
Pictures releases in theaters Friday, Chastain gives perhaps the most ambitious performance of her career so far. For the widely admired actor of “The Tree of Life,” “Zero Dark Thirty” and “The Help,” it’s the first time she’s tackled a decadesspanning biopic with all the transformational trappings — the make-up, the prosthetics, the accent. It’s a big swing, one Chastain was hungry for.
“There were a number of reasons I wanted to do it,” says Chastain, who acquired the rights to adapt the documentary in 2012. “But number one was it was the scariest because it’s the most far-reaching.”
It was during the press tour for 2012’s “Zero Dark Thirty” that Chastain first caught the RuPaul-narrated doc on TV. At the time, it seemed like the furthest thing from her
CIA operative in Kathryn Bigelow’s film. The documentary, while reveling in the kitsch of the Bakkers, sought to celebrate the much-parodied Messner, who died in 2007 at the age of 65.
At its most popular, “The PTL Club,” their flagship program, reached as many as 13 million households. Constant appeals for donations from viewers helped swell their ministry, including Heritage USA, a Disneystyle theme park and resort in South Carolina.
But sex and financial scandal toppled their empire. Bakker (played by Andrew Garfield in the film) used ministry funds to pay a woman who said Bakker sexually assaulted her. (Bakker denied it.) He was convicted in 1989 of raising pledges with false promises while also steering millions to pay for the couple’s lavish lifestyle.