Michael Shannon joins Chastain in the new Showtime series which tells the tragic love story of the country icons. The six-part limited series is based on the book The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George, written by their daughter Georgette Jones.
Abe Sylvia, the writer of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the movie that bagged Chastain her first Oscar this year, penned the script for George & Tammy and was also the showrunner. The show follows the two performers’ story over the decades, documenting their rise and fall as the most famous couple in country music.
Newsweek spoke to the team behind George & Tammy to find out more.
The ‘Sweet’ Side of George & Tammy
The legacy of George Jones and Tammy Wynette as a couple is somewhat tarnished by the infamous stories that surround them. It’s perhaps easy to overlook the fact that they were once very much in love, which led to their collaborations “We’re Gonna Hold On,” Golden Ring," and “Near You”—all of which topped the U.S. country music charts.
“Well, gee, I don’t think there’d be much point without sweetness,” Shannon told Newsweek, discussing the importance of showing the couple’s softer side. “Who wants to sit and watch two people just be mean to each other?”
“We can do it,” Chastain jumped in," welcome to our Tuesday."
Writer and showrunner Sylvia likened George and Tammy to another doomed musical couple, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.
“They’re both couples that flew too close to the sun, like Icarus characters. As a writer, that’s just absolute gold,” Sylvia told Newsweek, adding, “I think for artists like George and Tammy, that was the gift that they gave us. They told us so much about humanity and pain and joy and love—you felt their pain, you felt their sorrow, you felt their love for one another.”
“It’s who they were, we’re not trying to manipulate [their story] all that much,” Shannon said. “We’re really just trying to get to who they were, as best as we can tell. Neither one of us has met them but we’ve met their daughter, and we’ve met their friends. And we’ve read everything there is to read about them. So we’re just trying to honor their memory and their lives as best we can.”
Getting to Know Tammy Wynette
This is Chastain’s second famous character named Tammy who she’s played in a year, after winning the Academy Award for portraying TV evangelist Tammy Faye Messner in The Eyes of Tammy Faye.
In the first trailer for George & Tammy, Chastain says, as Tammy Wynette, “There’s something about having a number one hit, it does something to a person. After the first number one, you can’t wait for the next one.”
This insatiable drive for success and accolades isn’t quite something Chastain can relate to.
“No, I’m still really kind of in shock about the first one,” Chastain told Newsweek, referring to her Oscar win. “I walk into my living room every once in a while and I forget it’s there and I see it and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I mean, it’s amazing. But no, that definitely wasn’t my first thought of ‘I can’t wait till the—no no no.’”
Owing to Tammy Wynette’s tragic death in the ’90s, Chastain never got the opportunity to meet the country music singer. But she got to speak with the next best thing.
Georgette Jones, a country music singer in her own right, opened up about the reality of growing up with George Jones and Wynette as her parents in the warts-and-all memoir The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George. She was available as a resource for the cast and creators of the show.
“I think they were very, very, very close and accurate to the emotions I think my parents must have been feeling at different times,” Jones told Newsweek, speaking about the experience of Shannon and Chastain playing her parents.
“I think it came down to, Abe and Andrew [Lazar] and Jessica, the three of them (George & Tammy’s producers) championing our fight for us. Fighting for true and accurate representations—not something that was just going to be extraordinary and hopefully gets people to come [and] watch it. That was not the point of it. And I really appreciate the fact that they were concerned about the actual story. That doesn’t always happen.”
Chastain managed to mine some specific details from the country music couple’s daughter. The actress explained how she needed the minor details of Wynette’s later life.
“There’s something [that] happens later on in a scene in the series where we find out a lot about Tammy’s medical issues. So I really wanted to know the specifics of what that was. When she was in pain, what it looked like, and how she carried herself around others. I wanted to be as specific as possible with that.”
Shannon also made sure to utilize Georgette Jones’ first-hand knowledge, but he thinks he left an impression on her too.
“One day, I was walking across the parking lot. We were at this studio down in Wilmington and I was made up as in the 90s George,” Shannon recalled. “Georgette was walking towards me across the parking lot and she had never seen me done up like that. She just kind of lost it a little bit. And she said, ‘it seemed just like dad was walking towards me.’ So I took that as a—I don’t even want to say ‘a compliment,’ but it just made me feel like I was doing the right thing.”
The first episode of George & Tammy premieres on Showtime at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Sunday, December 4, 2022.
