Jessica Chastain “Stopped Eating” to Make Herself “Look Sick” to Portray Tammy Wynette in ‘George & Tammy’

Jessica Chastain underwent a physical transformation to portray Tammy Wynette in the upcoming Paramount Network series George & Tammy. And you might be thinking, didn’t she just do that? Well, sort of, but that was to play another Tammy, who was also a 1960s singer, in another project.

Created by Dead to Me‘s Abe Sylvia, George & Tammy shines a spotlight on country music couple Tammy Wynette and George Jones, respectively played by Chastain and Michael Shannon. The limited series is based on the novel The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George, written by the couple’s daughter, Georgette Jones, and is said to explore their tumultuous, on-and-off relationship which inspired their top singles “The Ceremony”, “We’re Gonna Hold On,” and “We Loved It Away”.

Chastain, who also serves as a producer, signed onto the project in 2011, when it was originally set to be a film. In an interview with Vanity Fair, she admitted that she wasn’t familiar with the singer upon signing on to the project, but was intrigued by her successful career and duality. She said, “It was fascinating to me that someone like Tammy Wynette, who sang all these songs like ‘Stand by Your Man,’ also was married five times.”

Glitz and glam aside, the Academy Award winner went through a major physical transformation to channel Wynette’s later years, when the singer was battling addiction and health problems. Chastain shared, “I don’t really like to look at scales, but I stopped eating. I was drinking juices and I kept doing it until I looked sick.”

Chastain shared a similar story while doing press for 2021’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye where she did “permanent damage to [her] skin” while undergoing a 7-hour transformation to play the famed evangelical. “When you’re wearing it all day every day — the weight of it on your body, it stretches your skin out. I finally took it off and I was like, ‘I look 50 years old!’”

These sort of physical transformations are common within Hollywood, but have long-been scrutinized. Bryce Dallas Howard recently shared that she was asked to lose weight for Jurassic World: Domination, but was “protected” by her director. “I got to do so many stunts that wouldn’t have been possible if I had been dieting,” she said.