There is something perfect about Tammy Faye Bakker’s notorious cosmetic stylings leading to Oscar recognition. At the height of the late Christian televangelist’s 1980s fame, her dramatic mask of makeup — elephant-thick lashes, painterly eye shadow, very big hair — was lampooned across the media, from tabloids to late-night comedy shows. But the relentless jokes never seemed to faze Bakker. On the contrary, she loved her over-the-top-look and remained so committed to it that she made much of it permanent by tattooing her brows, eye-liner and lip-liner. She seemed so proud of her look that it’s easy to imagine her responding to the Oscar nominations of the people who recreated it in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” with a full-hearted “Hallelujah!”
For the film’s makeup artist Linda Dowds and hairstylist Stephanie Ingram, nominated for Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling along with prosthetics whiz Justin Raleigh, Bakker’s commitment to her appearance was key to reproducing it on the film’s star, Jessica Chastain. The movie traces several decades of Bakker’s life, from fresh-faced 1960s Bible college student to exhaustively made-up ex-television personality trying to bounce back from the scandal that sent her then husband to prison in 1989. According to Dowds, the hardest era to nail was the tattooed, harder-edged later years. Any time Dowds worried that that last stroke of mascara, say, would push the look into clown-like parody, she thought about a scene from the 2000 documentary, also called “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” that the Chastain film is based on.
“A makeup artist in that opening sequence wants to take off Tammy’s makeup. And she’s saying, ‘No, no, no. This is permanent. A lot of this is permanent.’ And the makeup artist even tries to get her to soften the lashes. And she’s like, ‘No, this is who I am. This is how I look. This is how people know me. This is me.’ And so anytime I was struggling a little bit with the hardness of that look, I was reminded that she stood in it very strongly, very honestly, and then I could go, OK, she was happy with this. I’m happy with this.”
On Oscar nominations morning, Chastain told TheWrap how important it was to her that her film portray its protagonist as a human being, not a two-dimensional character. “I wanted us to look back at ourselves, how we judge, how people are stereotyped through the media, how we judge women, and try to make people accountable,” Chastain said, pointing in particular to Bakker’s support of the gay community during the AIDS crisis — a shocking act of rebellion in the arch-conversative Christian community at the time.
The hair and makeup team took that humanizing approach very much to heart. For one thing, the image of Tammy Faye weeping big mascara-streaked tears that many of us may recall is purely a media creation. “I never found any images like that. She was incredibly well put together,” Dowds said. “She was a really, truly good and decent person in terms of what she revealed to others and how she wanted to help people. And so that was another really key element for all of us, feeling that particular responsibility of showing her in a light that maybe most people weren’t familiar with and taking the look, which was larger-than-life, taking it to the edge — that is who she was, she was very proud of her look — but never crossing the line into caricature.”
Dowds and Ingram have now worked with Chastain 16 times, from 2013’s “Mama” to “George and Tammy,” a Paramount Network series in production in which the actress stars as another Tammy — Tammy Wynette. “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” was their most complicated undertaking — and one of their favorites. Here, they take us through the secrets of the eyes, brows, lips, cheeks and hair of Tammy Faye.
1960s
We meet the youngest incarnation of Chastain’s Tammy Faye in 1960, at a Minnesota Bible college where she meets Jim Bakker (played by Andrew Garfield). This Tammy Faye is the film’s softest: curly auburn flip with headband, and more “natural” makeup — though her love for lushious lashes is already evident. “The young stage, Tammy was wearing a bit of makeup in Bible college, which was really kind of unheard of,” Dowds said. “That look was very light and fresh. That was an easy one.”
As the decade progresses, Tammy Faye’s look becomes more defined, and auburn waves give way to a platinum blond bouffant, one of Ingram’s favorite looks. It was one of about a dozen wigs that the hairstylist used in the film. “We used all human hair wigs and styled appropriately for the era we were filming in,” she said.
1980s
The dawn of the Reagan era meant pastel eye-shadows and perms. “The eighties I loved for all the colors and the softness,” Dowds said. “(Tammy Faye) loved pinks and blues and violets, and she was wearing lighter colored wigs and all of that. … She was very, very matchy-matchy with her clothes, with her wigs, with her makeup and lip colors and nails. So that was a really important element.”
The long curly locks (see below) were also one of Ingram’s favorites, though they were not easy to pull off. “I had to take two wigs, sew them together at the color roots and set it with perm rods every time the wig was worn,” she said.
Even before Jim Bakker’s criminal conviction led to a collapse of the couple’s Christian entertainment empire, the film shows Tammy Faye falling apart behind the scenes, popping pills and downing Diet Coke. But it was during this time, in 1985, that she dedicated a segment of her TV program “Tammy’s House Party” to interviewing Steven Pieters, a gay Christian minister with AIDS, and encouraged her viewers to show compassion to AIDS patients.
The film recreates the moment, showing Chastain in a teased and lacquered blond wig and a 1980s-blue shimmering eye-shadow, seemingly laid on with a trowel (below). “It was a lot of frosty colors. I have a renewed appreciation for all those drug store quads,” Dowds said, referring to the packs of inexpensive eye-shadows that came in packs with four different colors. Dowds was able to source many of the very same products that Bakker used, including her preferred L’Oréal Shout Out mascara from the era, which the makeup artist replaced with a similar product from today (since mascara has an expiration date). “There were times where you can’t always see the forest for the trees, so I’d be working and I’d say, ‘What do you think? Is this too much?’” Dowds recalled. “Jess is a brilliant collaborator and is very sharing in the process. Sometimes you just need to see it all together. So once the costume was on and the wig is on and everything is all put together, then you go, ‘OK, this feels right.’”
1990s and beyond
By the time of the Bakker’s downfall, Tammy Faye is sporting the extreme look that is so ingrained in the public’s mind. Chastain’s very first scene in the film takes place in this era, in a reinterpretation of the documentary segment that Dowds used as a reference point. It’s 1994 and we see Tammy Faye in intense close-up, talking to an off-camera makeup artist who, yes, asks to remove some of her cosmetic mask and “soften” her lashes. “No, no,” Chastain’s Tammy Faye replies. “You can do anything you want, but my eyelashes stay right where they are.” Fluffing her red wig, she adds, “Yeah, this is who I am.”
The scene is a showcase for Dowds’ work — even as it depicts Tammy Faye removing her lipstick, leaving behind that dark lip liner that in real life was tattooed and here is approximated with waterproof pencils. Helping keep everything in place were Raleigh’s cheek prosthetics. “(There) was the maximum amount of prosthetics on Tammy’s face (in that scene),” Dowds said. “And so with that, the base (makeup) is airbrushed on, so it has a lot of staying power, not like regular foundation. So stuff that she was wiping away there, that didn’t really shift.”
The film also closes with this look. Backstage before a performance, Tammy Faye removes a full-bodied red wig to reveal her own choppy red shag that in reality was another of Ingram’s creations. “The biggest challenge was the two-piece red wig,” Ingram said. “Jessica wanted to take it off to show sparse hair, as it was (Tammy Faye’s) natural hair. I took a human hair wig matched as close as possible (to the bottom wig) and sewed a cotton head band to the (top) wig (so Jessica could remove it easily).”
