Assassin, alien villain, televangelist: The many faces of Jessica Chastain

In an extraordinary act of on-screen metamorphosis, Chastain recently transformed to play a religious TV star in ‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’. Geoffrey Macnab looks back over her career and the vast range of roles she has played in every genre imaginable

In many of Chastain’s best roles, the star’s characters have a steely determination that she clearly shares (Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock)

She has big teeth, big hair, big nails and layers of perfectly applied make-up. She speaks in a broad Minnesota accent and wears a near permanent smile. She has almost as many pairs of shoes as Imelda Marcos and loves to dress up. Catch a glimpse of her and you might mistake her for one of the stars of some 1980s soap opera like Dynasty. This is televangelist/singer/celebrity Tammy Faye Bakker, as played by Jessica Chastain in the new biopic, The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

Chastain won a “tribute” award at the Toronto Film Festival last week for what the festival called a “captivating performance that is nothing short of alchemy”. She is now a frontrunner in this year’s Oscar race. Critics and awards voters love it when actors go the extra mile to transform into the character they’re playing. They’re still talking about all those extra pounds Robert De Niro put on, and then took off again, when he both bulked up and dieted to play middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980). They liked it when Christian Bale starved himself to play the insomniac lead in The Machinist (2004). Now, they’re lapping up the stories about the seven hours a day Chastain spent in the make-up trailer to play Tammy Faye at different stages of her life.

Chastain, who produced and initiated The Eyes of Tammy Faye, freely admits that her inspiration was a documentary of the same name made in 2000, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato and narrated by RuPaul. Compare shots of Chastain as the televangelist with scenes from the documentary and you’ll often struggle to distinguish between the real woman and the actor portraying her. The new movie offers the most extreme example of Chastain’s ability to reinvent herself from role to role. This is the first time she has used prosthetics to this extent. However, look through her credits over the last decade and you’ll find someone who rarely plays the same character twice.