THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE

The concern in transforming Jessica Chastain into the flamboyant televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker — who famously had no top to go over in terms of hair and makeup — was: How much Tammy Faye was too much?

“We didn’t want to completely obliterate Jessica in this process,” says Justin Raleigh, who created and applied the special prosthetic makeup effects. “You can lose the audience’s connection to the person under the prosthetics when you completely cover them.”

Raleigh’s team employed a computer-rendered amalgamation of both women’s features. “We took it to the most extreme coverage, then peeled away all those layers down to the hallmark elements,” says Raleigh.

Raleigh augmented the baseline look to reflect Bakker’s ’80s/’90s era with larger, fuller facial prosthetics to show weight gain, and an enhanced lip line; for her later years, that look was aged with stippled latex over stretched skin to create crepe-like wrinkles. From there, Chastain, her longtime collaborator and makeup department head Linda Dowds, and hair department head Stephanie Ingram formulated more specific looks.

“The look across the board was pretty intense,” says Ingram of Bakker’s ever-shifting, oft-stratospheric hairstyles. “It’s amazing how different she looked when you took her from the ’80s, when it was curly and dirty blond with roots, to when she had it short, and then at the end when she was red … The colors of the wigs that she wore in those times were showing how Tammy was actually feeling.”

Top: Andrew Garfield as Jim Bakker and Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye Bakker in Searchlight Pictures’ The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Below: Chastain on the film’s set, being transformed into the televangelist.