Showtime’s new six-part series George & Tammy begins on the bathroom floor, where George Jones is on another drinking bender. The Texas-born crooner, who earned the diminutive “Possum” to describe his unusual, wiry appearance, would go by another nickname – “No Show Jones” – for the numerous concerts he would miss due to alcohol. When Tammy Wynette (real name, Virginia Pugh) first meets Jones for an audition in a motel room the following morning, her three daughters in tow, she finds him passed out naked with two girls in his bed. “I haven’t shit in three days,” Jones growls. “Mister Jones,” Wynette responds curtly, “I’ve got mouths to feed and a messy house, so if you’re not gonna say ‘yes’ to me, then I’m just gonna get on with my day.”
Jones and Wynette would go on to become not only the biggest hitmakers in Nashville, but also among the most well-known couples in America. Referred to in the music press as the “President and First Lady of Country Music”, they recorded 14 chart-topping duets with Epic Records producer Billy Sherrill, including “The Ceremony”, “We’re Gonna Hold On”, and “We Loved It Away,” rivalling other popular twosomes like Johnny and June, Nancy and Lee, and Porter and Dolly. After the tempestuous, and sometimes very public, disintegration of their marriage, leading to divorce in 1975, they continued recording love songs inspired by each other – both separately and together – ultimately producing two of the most impressive catalogues in the history of the country genre.
Yet the dramatic consequences such celebrity had on their private lives were as heartbreakingly epic as the lyrics to their songs.
Director John Hillcoat’s limited series stars Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain as Jones and Wynette in an unblinking portrait of the duo’s professional zeniths and personal depths as they struggled with poverty, religion, fame, alcohol and drugs, and numerous failed marriages. (Screenwriter Abe Sylvia based the script on daughter Georgette Jones’s 2011 memoir The Three of Us: Growing Up With Tammy and George.) At over five hours, the show epitomises the musical “deep cut” – in both senses of the term – slicing into the more obscure, and private, stories from the singers’ biographies, with some moments as raw and dark as a Bergman chamber drama.
It would be difficult to imagine two better actors than Chastain and Shannon – who previously starred together in Jeff Nichols’s 2011 drama Take Shelter – to portray hardscrabble Nashville royalty. Despite their Hollywood-lead status, both possess the workman-like ethic of character actors, keeping up the startling pace of three to five films a year on average for the past decade. (Shannon counts as many as 10 roles in 2016 alone.) Shannon’s work has often spotlighted Middle American roughnecks or rakish outsiders like mob hitman Richard Kuklinski, music impresario Kim Fowley, and a post-Comeback Elvis Presley. “I’ve been asked who I liked playing more, Elvis or George,” he says during a recent telephone conversation. “I would say that I really fell in love with both of them. I think they’re both very sweet people who were overwhelmed by their lives and overwhelmed by their own talents and abilities.”
For her part, Chastain, who also serves as an executive producer on the series, has built one of Hollywood’s most impressive resumes playing dramatic characters with markedly “un-Hollywood” pedigrees or regional backstories, from the Biblically inspired Mrs O’Brien in Terrence Malick’s suburban meditation The Tree of Life to televangelist-singer Tammy Faye Bakker, for which she won the Oscar. “I guess there might be something similar [between them],” Chastain says of the two Tammys – Wynette and Bakker – both rural Americans who grew up in the church before rising to massive celebrity within male-dominated fields, but without the approbation of the era’s growing feminist movement. It is a question that she has been asked often in the lead-up to the series’s premiere. “They are both women doing extraordinary things in an environment that suppresses them. Women who are defined by the men in their lives and break free from that.”
She adds that playing Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which included several musical sequences, allowed her to “dip her toe” into a singing character (a modest remark given her spectacular vocal chops in both projects) and gain the confidence that she needed to take on Wynette’s catalogue, although their approaches to music-making were decidedly different. “Tammy Faye was an incredible entertainer, and everything she sang she bellowed to the heavens,” she says. “But Tammy Wynette really was a storyteller.”
I ask if her career-long fascination with characters who are outside of the urban core or cultural elite played a part in her tenacious allegiance to Wynette. “I don’t know if I seek out a character from a socio-economic class,” she says. “But I’m definitely interested in people who fight against something or fight through something, and have challenges and things to overcome. Where Tammy Wynette came from – living on a cotton farm, then showing up in Nashville with three kids as a single mum and divorced woman – and where she ends up, as the ‘First Lady of Country Music,’ it’s quite shocking what she was able to accomplish. So, maybe it does come from [an interest in] characters who start without means, because they have to figure out where to find their places in the world.”
Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that she and Shannon, like Wynette and Jones, carved their own paths out of a childhood on the margins: Chastain in Sacramento and Shannon in Lexington, Kentucky, neither place a centre for arts or performance. They were also both the children of divorce, have described their teenage years as difficult, and elected for GEDs in lieu of completing high school. Chastain went on to study drama with a prestigious scholarship to Juilliard in New York while Shannon treaded the boards at Steppenwolf Theatre and cofounded A Red Orchid Theatre, both in Chicago.
“Our mums also have the same first names,” Chastain jokes about their shared histories. Both are married now (Chastain to fashion publicist Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo and Shannon to actress Kate Arrington) with children of their own, and have seemingly struck a balance between the demands of work- and home-life – the very heart of George & Tammy’s compelling story. Indeed, the series often feels like an extended diary of the famous couple’s most painful, private moments, dramatising Jones’s rampant alcoholism, Wynette’s chronic illnesses and drug addiction, and intermittent domestic abuse. Their tribulations were telegraphed in many of their greatest hits, which oscillated between fantasies of playing house and cautionary tales of broken homes. “They’re gonna take [our fire],” Jones warns Wynette ominously in the series’s first love scene, but is he referring to the music industry, the fates, or the fans? In a later episode, after an increasingly erratic Jones is reduced to spying on Wynette and the children from the street, she confronts him with the cutting question: “Why do you keep coming by my house, George?” Jones responds: “Just to see if I’m really gone.”
“Apparently, he really said that,” Shannon explains. “It was a conundrum for George: On the one hand, he was really longing for [a home], but on the other hand, it was something he was completely unprepared to deal with. He never really had it. Ever since he was a boy, home was a terrifying place. So, he finds Tammy, who really is his equal in so many ways. But can they both be these superstar singers and also have this domestic bliss?” He points to Jones’s darkest period of hell-raising, when the singer would need to be tied to a tree to prevent him from drinking. “Even people who were known for misbehaving said they had never seen nothing like George Jones. It’s just so much to contain inside of one person.”
“Tammy loved creating a home,” Chastain adds. “But what happens when you go on the road? It meant her children lived without her most of the time. There were so many sacrifices that she had to make, that both of them had to make. When you have a great talent like that, there is always a trade-off.”
Work pressures and personal trade-offs were not unfamiliar to Chastain and Shannon early in their professional careers. Both found that the move from live theatre to the film industry exposed them to a barrage of criticism for their “unconventional” looks. “[It] was something I was told over and over again,” Chastain admits. “I was actually told to dye my hair blonde. The people that I met [in LA] didn’t really care about the theatre or that I had trained at Juilliard. And I felt like, What am I doing in this industry?” She says that returning to the East Coast was one of the best decisions she made for herself. “I eventually found my place in the industry. But I don’t live in Los Angeles. I became a much happier person when I moved back to New York.”
Shannon offers his own jaundiced tales of industry grooming. “When I was very young, back in Chicago doing plays, I met this agent, a very sweet woman. She told me, ‘I want to sign you. But I have two requests: One, go to a speech therapist, because you talk funny. And two, take tetracycline. You’ll never get a job with all those pimples.’ And I said, ‘See you later’, and I left.” Later in his career, he was likened to Richard Kiel – known for playing Bond villain Jaws – and cult leader David Koresh. “They would say all sorts of other horrible things.” But he lays the blame for such cruelty on the industry itself. “There are these delineations that get made when you go out to LA. ‘Well, are you a leading man? Are you a character actor?’ You can call me whatever you want to call me, but do you have an interesting story for me to tell?” Now, Shannon seems to conjure up George Jones’s notorious saltiness when he describes his place in the Hollywood system: “I didn’t give a shit.”
It is clear that despite their incredible successes, neither Shannon nor Chastain are particularly absorbed by the one-upmanship and careerism that plagued Jones and Wynette throughout their lives. Still, they remain deeply moved by these figures who fought from living on the margins to the very centre of American culture – which makes their portrayals in George & Tammy even more exciting to watch. Nobody, it seems, has taken their fire.
