Steven Spielberg directed this coming-of-age drama from a screenplay he co-wrote with Tony Kushner. The semi-autobiographical story follows Sammy Fabelmen, played by Gabriel LaBelle. Sammy is a yearning filmmaker based on Spielberg himself.
Michelle Williams plays the mother, and Paul Dano plays the father.
Directed by Baz Luhrmann, Elvis follows Colon Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks. At the beginning of the trailer, Parker says, “There are some who make me out to be a villain.”
With the story by Luhrmman and Jeremy Doner, the screenplay is co-written by Luhrmann, Soner, Craig Pearce and Sam Bromell.
The story follows the life and career of the rock-n-roll legend Elvis Presley, played by Austin Butler. Australian, Olivia DeJonge plays Priscilla Presley.
Directed by Amy Poehler, Lucy and Desi explores the unlikely partnership and enduring legacy of one of the most prolific power couples in entertainment history.
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz risked everything to be together. Their love for each other led to the most influential show in the history of television, I Love Lucy.
After his family lost everything during the Cuban revolution of 1933, Desi was a refugee from Cuba and became a bandleader, an actor, and a brilliant producer and technology pioneer. Lucille came from nothing and, with an unrivaled work ethic, built a career as a model, chorus girl and eventually as an actor in the studio system. She found her calling in comedy, first in radio.
When Lucille was finally granted the opportunity to have her own television show, she insisted that her real-life spouse, Desi, be cast as her husband. Defying the odds, they re-invented the medium on the screen and behind the cameras.
The foundation of I Love Lucy was the constant rupture and repair of unconditional love. Lucy and Desi couldn’t make it work with each other; they gave to the rest of the world.
Lucy and Desi documentary offers an insightful and intimate peek behind the curtain of these two remarkable trailblazers — featuring interviews with Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill, Norman Lear, Desi Arnaz Jr, Carol Burnett and Bette Midler.
Poehler’s earliest memories, as a child, of I Love Lucy are of countless chuckles coming from her family’s living room, hearing her parents’ laughter as they watched the show.
“I Love Lucy and television were almost fused,” she states. “It was as if that show came with every television.”
But it was not until she was deep in her own career that she truly connected with it — and with its stars.
“It wasn’t until I got older, and doing comedy myself, that I really understood what they were doing and was able to see the many layers to their genius. I’m inspired by the big swings that the two of them took. They came to their success with a lot of confidence.
And, because of that, they said ‘No’ to a lot of things. They took giant leaps. They left their homes and worked really hard and just kept gambling. And they didn’t play small. They were very, very brave.”
“The way into a lot of stories,” Poehler explains, “for most people, is a love story. It’s really universal. I knew I wanted to touch on important themes — the different ways they approached work, what kind of work comedy is, and what they did as pioneers for television.
But we succeed and fail based on how much we care about their love story.”
Poehler was also keen to tell the story of how Ball and Arnaz completely turned the television world upside down, Sinclair notes. “Amy came to this with a very strong point of view about who Lucille Ball was — an insurgent or a disruptor of the business.
They shot in L.A. They shot it on film; they used three cameras; they cast a man of color in the leading role for a national sitcom. This isn’t just a story of ‘funny’ — it’s a story of disrupting the T.V. business, and of a relationship that breaks and makes.”
Another key part of their story for Poehler quickly became evident. “One of the themes that I grasped onto very early on was the idea of ‘rupture and repair,’ which is something that comedy can do really well. It’s what people turn to when their own lives are chaotic. And I Love Lucy was one of the early adopters of that genre: you have a problem, let everything unravel, but, don’t worry, it’s gonna be okay.”
This is the extraordinary true story of eccentric British artist Louis Wain, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Wain’s playful, sometimes even psychedelic, pictures helped to transform the public’s perception of cats forever.
Moving from the late 1800s through the 1930s, we follow the incredible adventures of this inspiring, unsung hero as he seeks to unlock the “electrical” mysteries of the world and better understand his own life and the profound love he shared with his wife, Emily Richardson, played by Claire Foy.
Co-written and directed by Will Sharpe, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain follows the extraordinary life of Wain, who painted incredible images of cats. These paintings inspired the public to view cats as domestic pets instead of feral animals that eliminate rodents.
Sharpe describes the challenge of capturing Wain’s inner world as most exciting. “I immediately felt a connection to his pictures, which are full of humor and delightful little details about daily life, but also, sometimes, seemed to have an undercurrent of restlessness and worry, or even sadness.”
“I wanted to take the spirit of those pictures — the wild colors and patterns, the funny tableaux, even the psychedelia — and to fold it into the world of our movie. The more I read about his life, the more I was struck by his courage in facing multiple challenges and how heroically he seemed to face them. It felt like an epic Odyssean life, and I knew there was a story here that could be really uplifting, transporting, and, hopefully, relatable for many people.”
Sharpe’s primary roadmap through the artist’s life came with the love story between Wain and Emily when developing the script.
“I thought the way that the love story was structured, in a slightly unusual and on the surface of it in an unfortunate way, left space for a lot of beauty to be mined,” Sharpe says.
Louis met Emily when she was the governess to his sisters. They had quite a controversial relationship and subsequent marriage. “They had to fly in the face of convention, and there would have been a lot of pressure on them not to be together,” says Sharpe
With the death of his wife so early in his life, Louis Wain’s story also deals with grief, another facet of the love he holds for Emily, which acts as a catalyst for realizations he makes during his later years in life.
“Grief is a theme in this movie, and all of it is tied together under the umbrella of love,” explains Sharpe. “What Louis realizes is that the reason he felt pain is because he loved Emily and that his love for her and Peter (the cat) has inadvertently helped him to appreciate the love that was around him—his friends and family and the people who enjoyed his work.”
Sharpe wanted to present Emily as the person who helped Wain learn what love is — so that he had something to reconnect with at the end of the story.
Cumberbatch feels that Wain’s is a moving story, who leaped at the chance to take the leading role. “I was drawn to him because of his artistry. I also found him incredibly persuasive in a very gentle way. And the fact that he was so talented and lived through so much tragedy, I found that whole journey just extraordinary.”
The rest of the cast includes Andrea Riseborough, Toby Jones, Sharon Rooney, Aimee Lou Wood, Hayley Squires, Phoebe Nicholls, Adeel Akhtar, Asim Chaudhry, Richard Ayoade, Julian Barratt, Sophia di Martino, Taika Waititi, Nick Cave and Olivia Colman.
Sorkin has taken one of America’s funniest and most beloved TV couples, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, and turned it into a poignant story for a film. The Ricardos first appeared in the iconic sitcom I Love Lucy, which premiered in 1951.
In front of our TV sets, we saw a quintessential dizzy redhead and the charismatic Cuban bandleader, delighting record-breaking audiences each week. They’d see Lucy’s hare-brained schemes and hilarious antics.
Behind the scenes was a different story. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz faced problems that could have ended the successful show and their marriage. Kidman talks about Lucille Ball’s career and portrays her, “As an actress, she never really got a break when she was younger. Movies were not her métier. But that is part of what made her resilient. She, with Desi’s support and protection, reinvented herself as a comedy star. But it was all so tenuous and could be taken away by a couple of cheap headlines. That is still very relevant today.”
Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, Being the Ricardos follows Lucille Ball, played by Nicole Kidman, and Desi Arnaz, played by Javier Bardem, as they face a crisis. They face the devastating fact that they most likely will end their careers and marriage. Lucy and Desi must deal with the impending threats of shocking personal accusations, political smears, and cultural taboos.
The film clip is like the trailer, but we see more of Kidman as Lucy and Bardem as Dezi.
We go behind the scenes of one of the most popular TV shows of our time, revealing a glimpse of the couple’s complex romantic and professional relationship. During one critical production week of their groundbreaking sitcom, “I Love Lucy,” we go into the writer’s room, onto the soundstage and behind closed doors with Lucy and Desi.
Having two Oscar winners play the lead roles of two influential personalities in the entertainment industry must be a dream come true for Sorkin.
The cast includes Jake Lacy, J. K. Simmons, Nina Arianda, Tony Hale and Alia Shawkat.
Sorkin says, “Javier made it clear he wanted the part. And he is simply irresistible. I didn’t need to be told he’s a great actor. We were finishing casting during the COVID lockdown and he was so winning, even during Zoom meetings. That quality was essential for Desi because we asked the audience to accept such bad behavior from him. Until the day he died, he was intensely in love with Lucille Ball, but he came from a culture that defines manhood very narrowly. It was hard for Desi to be a second banana, and that ultimately killed their marriage.”
Bardem calls Sorkin’s script “a love letter to two resilient, creative human beings dealing with serious problems and trying to remain united through them,” adding, “It is a journey of pleasure and joy and laughter — a lot of laughter. There are great comic moments in it. But there are also dramatic, emotional moments that show that these people who were so loved and admired were just a couple of human beings with flaws — as we all are.”
The actor says it was typical for the cast to perform five or more pages of the writer’s notoriously precise dialogue daily. “There are always two or three or four things happening at the same time,” he says. “As a director, Aaron likes to work fast. He knows what he wants, which is a great thing, but he leaves you the room to play with it. And he gives you a lot of layers to work with.”
Despite the many personal and professional successes the couple achieves, Desi’s philandering threatens to destroy the couple’s marriage at the peak of their fame. “He wanted to help Lucille, protect her, hold her — not only because she was the star of the show but because she was his wife, the mother of his kids and an amazing, creative mind,” says Bardem. “But there were many things that he could have done better.”
It was Arnaz’s ambition and versatility that the actor says provided him with the most inspiration. “When we play real people, we want to get as close as we can to reality, but there’s a moment where you have to let that go,” he believes. “You have to express what the person is going through, not how he looks or speaks. Desi had a motor inside of him that constantly pushed forward, pushed not only himself but the show and the whole Desilu company.”
For the role of Arnaz, one of the rare Latinx talents to achieve stardom in television’s early days, the filmmakers cast Academy Award winner Javier Bardem. The actor had pursued the role for years before the film was green-lit.
Bardem describes his co-star, Kidman, as “generous, caring, organic, fun to work with, fun to watch, inspiring — and she makes it all look easy. She gives you everything, so you don’t have to hold anything back.”
Directed by George Clooney, The Tender Bar begins in 1972 and follows 9-year-old J.R. Maguire, played by Daniel Ranieri, later Tye Sheridan. He spends hours scanning the airwaves for The Voice, his name for the radio deejay father who deserted him and his mom years earlier.
As he dreams of the day they reunite, he and his fiercely protective mother Dorothy, played by Lily Rabe, live with her family in his curmudgeonly grandfather’s, played by Christopher Lloyd, rundown house in Manhasset, Long Island. They both work tirelessly to fulfill her dream of an Ivy League education for J.R.
Hungry for male attention, the boy finds comfort at the nearby Dickens pub, where the man behind the bar is his Uncle Charlie, played by Ben Affleck. A self-educated truth-seeker with a closet full of classic books and a thirst for knowledge, Charlie takes the boy under his wing, encouraging J.R.’s aspirations of becoming a writer. As J.R. grows to young adulthood with sporadic contact with his birth father, Charlie guides him through the mysteries of manhood and includes him in bowling nights, ball games and trips to the beach with his loyal band of quirky friends.
But when winning a scholarship to Yale, falling in love with a brilliant and beautiful classmate and getting his dream job still don’t seem like enough to J.R., he retreats once more to the bar, only to discover he already has everything he needs to claim his own dreams.
Adapted by William Monahan from J. R. Moehringer’s memoir of the same title published in 2005, “It’s the story of a not-privileged kid deciding to do the fundamentally impossible,” says Monahan. “But beneath the ordinary world, it is kind of an epic. It’s the very rare first book by a writer who doesn’t throw family and friends under the bus after chewing them up for material. It says of the family, I am them, and they are me.
“J.R. had a very supportive, very loving family,” he adds. “They got him into Yale, they helped him, they compensated for his lack of a present, decent father. And in the end, despite his searching, he realizes that he always had a father — his Uncle Charlie, and even his grandfather. There’s something heroic in his story.”
Clooney felt a kinship to the material. “Growing up in Kentucky, which is nothing like Manhasset, I had an Uncle George who I was named after,” he says. “George lived above a really beat-up old bar. When I was 9 or 10 years old, which is the exact time period in which the early part of the movie is set, he’d give me 50 cents to go get him cigarettes from the machine and a can of beer. So, I grew up in and around a bar like the bar in the film, with all the wild characters that called me ‘kid.”
Though Clooney has directed himself in some films. In The Tender Bar, he remains strictly behind the camera. “That simplifies the job for sure,” he says. “This was an easy one to direct anyway because it was a really good script, we had really wonderful actors and we had a great crew. I just loved all these characters. It’s The Wizard of Oz in a way. J.R. is constantly looking for happiness and his place in the world, and it’s right there all along. I think that’s a voyage we all enjoy watching.”
“Once we told Amazon we wanted to do The Tender Bar, the question was who was going to play Uncle Charlie,” says Clooney. “The character had to have two specific qualities. You have to believe he’s really smart and really well read. That is a no-brainer with Ben Affleck.
He’s a really smart actor and a smart man. And then he has to be a little worn down. He needs a bit of gravitas. Ben is a different actor now than he was 15 years ago. With age comes a little bit of gray in the hair and a little bit of crinkle in his eye. Ben couldn’t have played this part five or 10 years ago. Now he is exactly right for it. As soon as we read the script, we thought of him.”
“The luckiest thing that can happen to you as an actor is to have a great script with a great director fall out of the sky,” he says. “That’s what happened to me. The character’s intelligence and use of language, as well as his evident compassion for his nephew and the non-traditional ways he shows it made it extremely appealing.”
The seamless transition from boy to teenager to a young man in the film impressed Tye Sheridan, who plays the older J.R.,“That can be credited to a well-written script and a flawlessly constructed narrative,” says Sheridan. “I could not trust anyone more than George to guide that ship so that the audience believes this journey into the older version of the character.”
Sheridan says reading the book before filming was initially helpful, but he set it aside once production started. “It’s great to be aware of the source material,” he notes. “But you can get confused by what’s in the screenplay and what’s in the book, so eventually I just focused on the screenplay.”
At the beginning of the film, J.R. already carries the weight of his mother’s high hopes for him. “He feels a great responsibility to accomplish certain things — specifically to go to Yale and become a lawyer — but all he really wants to do is be a writer,” says Sheridan. “He has a lot to overcome in his life. That was something very relatable and really exciting for me to play.”
Despite the presence of his Uncle Charlie, his grandparents and extended family in his life, his mother is the only person J.R. feels he can totally depend on. “She’s his only parent,” Sheridan observes. “She’s it. Their relationship is tender and sweet. Sometimes he gives her a bit of an eye roll, but he loves her for all she is and has given to him. Lily Rabe, who plays J.R.’s mother, is a phenomenal actress who brings a depth that I don’t think many people could bring.”
Eight-year-old Brooklynite Daniel Ranieri, who plays the younger J.R., was discovered via a YouTube video that has come to be known as the “f—ing lockdown video.” In 2020, Daniel’s mother talked to him about the upcoming summer and all the outdoor activities. Daniel launched into a colorful rant about the need to comply with COVID-19 restrictions by staying indoors. The video she took of his comments went viral, earning him an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” A star was born.
“A friend sent the video to me as a joke, while we were trying to cast the young J.R.,” says Clooney. “We’d seen a lot of kid actors, but the reality is when you cast kids, it’s less about the quality of the acting and more about how close they seem to be to the character. Daniel has a great East Coast accent. He was very funny and has really good energy in the video. I got in touch with his family, sent over some pages, and he read them on Zoom. He was just right for the part. Every take we did with him was one take. He is just phenomenal.”
Directed by the Erwin brothers, American Underdog follows Kurt Warner, played by Zachary Levi. He went from being a stock boy at a grocery store to being a two-time NFL MVP, Super Bowl champion, and Hall of Fame quarterback.
Warner’s story is about years of challenges and setbacks that could have derailed his aspirations to become an NFL player. Just when his dreams seemed all but out of reach, it is only with the support of his wife, Brenda, played by Anna Paquin, and the encouragement of his family, coaches, and teammates that Warner perseveres and finds the strength to show the world the champion that he already is.
It’s billed as an uplifting story showing that anything is possible with faith, family and determination.
The cast also includes Dennis Quaid, who plays Dick Vermeil.
Written and directed by Kenneth Branagh, he says, “Belfast is the most personal film I have ever made. About a place and a people I love.”
Branagh uses a humorous, tender and intense story from the heart of one boy’s childhood during the tumult of the late 1960s in his city’s birth. The movie is straight from his experience as a nine-year-old boy who charts a path towards adulthood through the world that has suddenly turned upside. The stable and loving community and everything he thought he understood about life changes forever, but joy, laughter, music and the formative magic of the movies remain.
Behind the camera, Branagh brings his regular collaborators as we arrive in the summer of 1969. We follow nine-year-old Buddy, played by Jude Hill. Buddy knows who he is and where he belongs. Part of the working class of North Belfast, he’s happy, loved and safe. His world is a fast and funny street life lived mainly in the heart of a community that laughs together and sticks together.
The extended family lives on the same street, and it’s impossible to get lost because everyone in Belfast knows everyone else, or so it seems, foreboding arrives. Every spare minute, in the darkness of movie theatres and front of the television, American films and American TV transport and intoxicate Buddy’s inner life and his dreams.
Yet, August turns Buddy’s childhood dreams into a nightmare. Festering social discontent suddenly explodes in Buddy’s street and escalates fast. First, it’s a masked attack, then evolves into a riot and eventually a city-wide conflict, with religion fanning the flames further asunder. Catholics vs. Protestants, loving neighbors just a heartbeat ago, set on to be deadly foes now.
Buddy must make sense of the chaos and hysteria that prevails. The new physical lockdown of what used to be an endless landscape. People as heroes and villains, once only glimpsed on the cinema screen but now threatening to upturn everything he knows and loves as an epic struggle plays out in his backyard.
His Ma, played by Caitriona Balfe, struggles to cope while his Pa, played by Jamie Dornan, works away in England, trying to make enough money to support the family. Vigilante law rules, innocent lives are threatened. Buddy knows what to expect from his heroes on the silver screen, but in real life? Can his father be the hero he needs? Can his mother sacrifice her past to protect her family’s future? How can his beloved grandparents, played by Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds, be safe? And how can he love the girl of his dreams?
The answers roll out in this interesting story of a funny, poignant and heartbreaking journey through riots, violence, the joy and despair of family relationships and the agony of first love, all accompanied by dancing, music and laughter that only the Irish can muster when the world turns upside down.
“Belfast is a city of stories,” says Branagh, “and in the late 1960s, it went through an incredibly tumultuous period of its history, very dramatic, sometimes violent, that my family and I were caught up in. It’s taken me fifty years to find the right way to write about it, to find the tone I wanted. It can take a very long time to understand just how simple things can be, and finding that perspective years on provides a great focus. The story of my childhood, which inspired the film, has become a story of the point in everyone’s life when the child crosses over into adulthood, where innocence is lost. That point of crossover in Belfast in 1969 was accelerated by the tumult happening around us all. At the beginning of the film, we experience a world in transition from a kind of idyll – neighborliness, sunshine and community – which is turned upside down by the arrival of a mob who pass through like a swarm of bees and lay waste to this peace. When they’ve gone, the street is literally ripped up by worried people who now feel they have to barricade themselves against another attack, and that is exactly how I remember it. I remember life turning on its head in one afternoon, almost in slow-motion, not understanding the sound I was hearing, and then turning around and looking at the mob at the bottom of the street, and life was never, ever, ever the same again. I felt that there was something dramatic and universal in that event because people might recognize a crossover point in their own lives, albeit not always as heightened by external events.”
Through the eyes of Buddy, the story unfolds, similar to Hope and Glory and Empire of the Sun. Branagh says, “We found a boy (Hill) whose talent was ready to blossom but who was still enjoying himself as an ordinary kid. Playing football was as important to him as making the film, and that’s what we wanted. At the same time, he was always very serious about the work, very prepared and very open.”
“Caitriona Balfe, who plays Ma, is from Ireland but grew up near the border and has an understanding of the vernacular and of the Irish extended family life,” he says. “Jamie Dornan, who plays Pa, is a real Belfast boy from just outside Belfast. Ciarán Hinds, who plays Buddy’s grandfather, Pop, was brought up about a mile from where I lived in Belfast.
Judi Dench has Irish blood – her mother was from Dublin – and is anyway an acting thoroughbred whose research is meticulous and who can do anything. And this group of actors also had a sense of front-footed energy that I liked, an outgoing quality that meant they became a real family very quickly.”
The film set in Belfast also provided excellent Northern Irish actors like Colin Morgan, Turlough Convery and Conor McNeill.
Directed by Sean Penn, Flag Day follows Jennifer Vogel, played by Dylan Penn, who comes to terms with her larger-than-life father. As a child, Jennifer marveled at his magnetizing energy and ability to make life feel like a grand adventure.
Yes. Dylan is Sean’s real-life daughter, which makes the production intriguing. She is a celebrity model whose international talent is huge.
Jennifer’s father taught her much about love and joy, but he also was the most notorious counterfeiter in US history. Based on a true story, Flag Day is an intimate family portrait of a young woman who struggles to rise above the wreckage of her past. At the same time, she reconciles the inescapable bond between a daughter and her father.
At the heart of the movie is a love story between a father and daughter. Sean Penn describes it, “a complicated one.” It is a story of one woman’s pursuit to find truth in her life after growing up in the shadow of her father’s criminality. We see the bonds of family ebb and flow with each truthful revelation and each destructive lie. This father-daughter story serves as a metaphor for a country that often cannot live up to its highest ideals.
A country that doesn’t follow through on its promises. Stoic imagery of flags waving and fireworks give way to darkened windows, disguises and eventually handcuffs and jail cells. Ultimately, it is a story of perseverance, of truth, and learning who you are in the shadow of someone else. It is a story of uncovering memories and examining those memories from a raw and vulnerable place.
The movie includes an impressive cast Josh Brolin, Norbert Leo Butz, Dale Dickey, Eddie Marsan, Bailey Noble, Hopper Jack Penn and Katheryn Winnick.
Directed by Michael Showalter, The Eyes of Tammy Faye takes an intimate look at the extraordinary rise, fall and redemption of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, played by Jessica Chastain.
In the 1970s and 80s, Tammy Faye and her husband, Jim Bakker, played by Andrew Garfield, rose from humble beginnings to create the world’s largest religious broadcasting network and theme park. The public revered their message of love, acceptance and prosperity.
Tammy Faye was legendary for her indelible eyelashes, her idiosyncratic singing, and her eagerness to embrace people from all walks of life. However, it wasn’t long before financial improprieties, scheming rivals, and scandal toppled their carefully constructed empire.
With these two powerhouse actors, we are going to see some fine acting, but we already know the storyline.
Jessica Chastain does meticulous preparation and research when developing characters, and becoming Tammy Faye was no different. She studied Tammy Faye Bakker for seven years, memorizing all of her mannerisms and vocal inflections from the hours of tape she watched.
Impressed, Michael Showalter says, “Her bar is very high, her level of dedication, perfectionism and preparedness. The level of the performance, the depths that she’s willing to go to. It’s amazing to work with an actor like that because they give so much.”
Building a character based on a well-known public figure is always a challenge, but Chastain’s biggest hurdle was overcoming how other people perceived Tammy Faye. “I spent years looking at footage of her and never once saw mascara running down her face,” said Chastain. “Tammy Faye was nothing like the caricature the media fed off of. She was the ordained minister Jim wasn’t. She preached acceptance and compassion and meant it, and that’s what we wanted people to see in this film. When everyone turned their backs on people with HIV and AIDS, she invited a high-profile gay pastor who had AIDS to be on her show. She also hosted Praise The Lord network shows all day long, wrote four books and released twenty-four albums. She never got paid for any of it. She gave her money back to the church.”
Chastain had been in close touch with Tammy Faye’s children before and during production. Tammy Faye’s daughter, Tammy Sue, and her two children traveled to set for the pivotal interview scene with HIV/AIDS activist Steve Pieters, played by actor Randy Havens, a gay minister who candidly spoke with Tammy about his illness, coming out and losing his partner. By the end of the shoot, family members were in tears, stunned and moved by the emotion the scene evoked. Bailey and Barbato also recognized the significance of her contribution to the LGBTQIA community, saying, “Homosexuality has often been demonized by the Christian community. At a time when people shrank from HIV and AIDS, Tammy was having none of it. She didn’t believe in labeling people. She understood the power of the camera to look into the eyes of people far and wide and share the truth.”
Playing a singer was another test for Chastain, whose previous musical experience only included college experience. Drawing inspiration from Tammy Faye, she dove right into an area outside of her comfort zone. “She was never embarrassed,” the actress added. “People were drawn to her because she was unique. She used her platform to advocate for a celebration of our differences and knowing that made it easier for me to perform.” It inspired Andrew Garfield in his role as Jim as well. “Tammy is so rooted into Jessica’s heart, and that’s an amazing place to come from. You follow her into the fray because of that; because she’s so passionate and devoted.”
Chastain and Garfield connected before shooting and began sending each other articles and videos about the Bakkers, but their commitment to building the characters’ relationship didn’t stop there. “Once we got to Charlotte, North Carolina, we would go to church every Sunday at Heritage USA,” Chastain recalled. “It became a weekly thing. We saw people that we recognized from watching the documentaries who had worked with Jim and Tammy. They were generous in giving us their insight. It was an incredible and inspiring way to start the work week.”
Being from the UK, Garfield wasn’t initially familiar with Bakker’s story, so he had a fresh perspective on the couple. “I knew that Tammy Faye was an icon in the LGBTQ community, but I didn’t know anything else,” said Garfield. “It’s a very American story, even the evangelical movement is a very American movement.”
Spirituality had always captivated Garfield and how ego and money can bastardize nearly every spiritual movement. Jim initially met Tammy Faye at North Central Bible College after leaving behind a “sinful” life as a rock’n’roll-loving DJ and devoted himself to serving Christ. Later on, when he and Tammy Faye founded Praise The Lord (PTL), the world’s largest religious broadcasting network, their success and wealth twisted Jim’s perception of his own faith. While researching Jim’s decline, it struck Garfield how many preachers equated God’s love with material wealth instead of redemption in the afterlife.
“Jim’s actually a very complicated person,” says Garfield. “I found it easy to fall in love with him. What he and Tammy did was really radical. They created a wild alternative to other Christian broadcasting of the time. They had a longing to heal people. Instead of waiting for joy in heaven, they advocated for happiness in the here and now. His downfall was that he lost sight of all of that, and I found his fallibility fascinating.”
Showalter also recognized the importance of portraying Jim Bakker in a more nuanced way. “Andrew really found humanity to Jim Bakker and… really forced us all to see Jim, not just as a two-dimensional character… we could have gone down that path, and I’m so glad we didn’t. Andrew has created this incredibly complicated, deeply flawed but also compelling character in Jim.”