[imagesource: Searchlight Pictures]

Usually, when Jessica Chastain plays a role in a movie, she looks like Jessica Chastain but acts like someone else.

I’m thinking of her in movies like Interstellar, Zero Dark Thirty, and The Tree Of Life.

But in her new movie, she transforms into someone unrecognisable.

Unless you were watching Tammy Faye Bakker (subsequently Messner after she remarried) in The PTL Club around the 1970s.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a turbulent story about an infamous couple that hosted the television show The PTL Club and developed Heritage USA, a now-defunct Christian theme park in South Carolina.

Chastain, 44, did almost 10 years of research for the role, including reading up about and watching interviews of Tammy before colon cancer took her life at age 65 in 2007, PEOPLE reports:

“I just was so blown away by her and her story,” Chastain tells PEOPLE.

“The thing I loved the most about Tammy is her capacity to love. She knew what it felt like to not feel important, and she didn’t want anyone to experience that.”

Tammy’s life with Jim Bakker included fraud, conspiracy, divorce, cancer, sex scandals, pill-popping, and everything else that lurks between religion, the media, and politics.

Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) directs, with a cast that includes Chastain, Andrew Garfield (The Social Network), Cherry Jones (The Village), Fredric Lehne (also Zero Dark Thirty), and Louis Cancelmi (The Irishman), among others.

Here’s more from The Wrap:

The trailer starts like any good story does — at the beginning. Here, Chastain still looks like herself, albeit with jet black hair…

From there, we get a crash course in the trajectory of the Bakker’s lives, leading all the way up to their fame as prominent televangelists.

Slowly but surely, Chastain goes from her typical self to the heavily made-up Tammy Faye, jumping through hairstyle and colours through the decades.

By the end of the trailer, the Oscar-winner is near unrecognisable, though a spitting image of Tammy Faye Bakker.

Take it away, Tammy:

The Eyes of Tammy Faye will come to theatres on September 17.

[sources:thewrap&people]