How ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’ Redeems an Iconic ’80s Laughingstock (2024)

Michael Showalter remembers televangelists Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker from when he was growing up. His father’s side of the family lived in Roanoke, Virginia, where there was often one evangelical show or another blaring from the television in the background. “I definitely remember watching their show with sort of a fascination,” he tells Vanity Fair. “It was a very Christian-based show and there was obviously a lot of ideology, but it was also just kind of fun to watch, sort of like a variety show. They were very entertaining.”

Like Showalter, many people probably remember the Bakkers for their puppet skits or Tammy Faye’s over-the-top hair and makeup. And many are aware of their downfall—how Jim Bakker was accused of using ministry funds to pay for the silence of a rape accuser and then later found guilty of 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy. (Bakker denied the rape allegation.) But in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which will play at the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of its September 17 release, Showalter tries to reveal much more of Tammy Faye’s story, led by a layered and absorbing performance by Jessica Chastain.

“Jessica completely just transforms into that character,” says Showalter. “By the end of the movie, I feel like you just completely forget you’re watching a performance. You’re just with this character that she’s created.”

It was Chastain, also a producer on the project, who first gravitated toward Tammy Faye’s story after she saw the 2000 documentary of the same name directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. It traces Tammy Faye’s life, from meeting Jim Bakker at a bible college to the rise and fall of their PTL empire. She optioned the rights in 2012, the same year she earned her first Oscar nomination for The Help.

When talking to Chastain and the team at Searchlight (which is releasing the film), Showalter pitched a film that would parallel the heightened reality that the Bakkers seemed to exist in. “Everything they do has a kind of drama to it and a kind of importance to it. I wanted to have fun with that,” he says. “There’s a soap opera quality to some of it, but also it’s a sort of elevated version of that. For me it was wanting it to be this explosion of color and energy.”

And the film (and 2022 Oscar winner) has those elements in spades, from the big hair and big costumes to the explosiveness of the Bakkers’ fights. But for Showalter, a veteran of the sketch comedy group The State whose more recent film credits include 2017’s The Big Sick and 2020’s The Lovebirds, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is also his most serious film yet. Underneath the showmanship is a story of a woman who was swept up in a scandal and found a way through it without losing her open heart. Says Showalter, “It was more for me about trying to put it forward in a way that was both fun and colorful and rich [and] that had a sense of humor, but that wasn’t poking fun at them.”

It could have been easy to make fun of the Bakkers, from Tammy Faye’s exaggerated signature look to the way the Bakkers lost their empire in the end. But she was also known as an open-minded individual who accepted everyone with love, even inviting AIDS activist Steve Pieters onto her show in 1985, when there was still a great deal of stigma surrounding the new disease.

“A big part of what was interesting to all of us is that she’s kind of misunderstood or misrepresented; that she was this kind of laughingstock. For a long time that’s how the culture viewed her, as this comic character,” says Showalter. “But she was really trailblazing in a lot of ways, and she was really true to her beliefs in a lot of ways. And she was a survivor.”

One of Showalter and Chastain’s top priorities was getting the makeup and prosthetics right. “There was a lot of fear going into it,” says Showalter. “There was a lot of work that went into fine-tuning the amount of prosthetics that she has on and exactly what was needed and what wasn’t. There was a lot of trial and error there.” Chastain (who also did all her own singing for the film) spent between four and seven and a half hours in the makeup chair every day to play Tammy Faye at different ages.

In the end Chastain’s transformation passed the ultimate test—approval from Tammy Faye’s family. Both of the Bakkers’ children, Tammy Sue and Jamie Charles, were involved in the making of The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Tammy Sue also sings the song that runs over the credits of the film). Tammy Sue visited the set with her sons while they were shooting in North Carolina, where they had recreated the Bakkers’ television studio. “I think that was really an intense experience for her—to walk into this TV studio and to see Jessica in the wardrobe and the makeup,” says Showalter.

Chastain wasn’t the only one who had to transform. Andrew Garfield, who stars as Jim Bakker, was tasked with playing the complicated and controversial character who goes from Tammy Faye’s doting boyfriend to a man whose desires for wealth and fame seem insatiable. “The actors are coming into it giving their characters the benefit of the doubt. That’s always interesting when you’re working with characters that have really big flaws and are controversial,” says Showalter.

The real Jim Bakker is still alive at 81 years old (Tammy Faye, who remarried after divorcing Bakker in 1992, died from cancer in 2007). He hosts the televangelical series The Jim Bakker Show and was recently in the news for a lawsuit brought against him and his production company after he claimed on the program that a product called Silver Solution could kill COVID-19. (A settlement was reached in June, with Bakker’s lawyers saying that it included “no findings whatsoever that our clients violated any laws or misled” the public.)

“Andrew very much had his own feelings about Jim Bakker, and who Jim Bakker is, and why Jim Bakker did the things that he did, and what things about Jim Bakker are and aren’t true,” says Showalter. “I do think that we were mindful of not trying to say what we think is true or isn’t true.”

But Showalter hasn’t spent much time wondering what Bakker himself might think about The Eyes of Tammy Faye—which, as the title implies, is much more concerned with how his ex-wife experienced the saga. Says Showalter with a slight shrug, “I mean, I hope he sees it. I would love it for him to see it.”

The Eyes of Tammy Faye will have its world premiere in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release the film in theaters September 17. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.

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