“She’s a firecracker, Jim,” says Vincent D’Onofrio, as Jerry Falwell, in the trailer for Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye. The film, according to distributor Searchlight Pictures, is “an intimate look at the extraordinary rise, fall and redemption of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker,” played by Jessica Chastain. Tammy Faye and her husband, Jim Bakker (played by Andrew Garfield), rose to fame with their televangelist PTL (Praise the Lord) empire in the 1970s and ’80s, and then to infamy after their church was embroiled in a sex-and-money scandal. This was toward the end of the ’80s, during which time Tammy Faye, already becoming legendary for her indelible eyelashes, began to break with many of her fundamentalist beliefs by embracing the LGBT community.
The film, which was written by Abe Sylvia and shares a name with the popular 2000 documentary directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato about Tammy Faye’s life, also stars Cherry Jones, Fredric Lehne, Louis Cancelmi, Sam Jaeger, Gabriel Olds, and Mark Wystrach.
See the trailer below:
Searchlight Pictures will release The Eyes of Tammy Faye on September 17.
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