Michael Showalter's The Eyes of Tammy Faye traces the extraordinary career of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker across two turbulent decades of American religious broadcasting.
What is The Eyes of Tammy Faye about?
Arriving on K-Time as a 2021 biography, the film follows the rise of a small-town preacher's wife into one of the most recognizable faces on American television. Jessica Chastain stars as Tammy Faye, opposite Andrew Garfield as her husband Jim Bakker, as the pair build a broadcasting empire and a sprawling religious theme park from almost nothing. Cherry Jones and Vincent D'Onofrio round out a cast surrounding the couple as their empire expands and their private struggles come under public scrutiny. Drama and romance intertwine with biography here: the film is less concerned with theology than with a marriage tested by ambition, fame, and the demands of an audience that expects perfection from its idols.
About the cast
Chastain anchors the film in a role that carries most of its screen time, with Garfield playing opposite her as a partner whose public certainty masks private strain. Cherry Jones, Vincent D'Onofrio, Mark Wystrach, Sam Jaeger, Louis Cancelmi, and Gabriel Olds fill out the supporting circle of colleagues, family, and rivals who orbit the couple through their years in broadcasting.
Context & significance
Set largely across the 1970s and 1980s, the film unfolds inside the world of American televangelism, a period when religious broadcasting reached new mass audiences through cable and syndication. Showalter frames that industry's growth alongside a marriage under pressure, using period detail — sets, wardrobe, television production itself — to track how a couple's public image diverged from their private life. Biography, drama, and romance sit together in the genre mix, giving the film room to move between the couple's professional ascent and its personal cost.
Watching The Eyes of Tammy Faye on Ktime
The Eyes of Tammy Faye streams on K-Time with a Farsi dub and Persian subtitles, so Persian-speaking viewers can follow the film either way. Reaching the page requires only a K-Time account login; the biography is free to read about here regardless. The film joins K-Time's catalogue of English-language dramas presented with the network's Farsi-first viewing experience for the diaspora audience.