Steve Pieters: Last News

The Eyes of Tammy Faye star Jessica Chastain joined makeup department head Linda Dowds and prosthetics designer Justin Raleigh for a virtual panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event.

Rev. Dr. A. Stephen Pieters, the AIDS activist and longtime HIV survivor known informally and widely as Steve Pieters following his groundbreaking 1985 interview by televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, died July 8 in Los Angeles after a two-week hospitalization with an infection. He was 70.

Jessica Chastain brought a very special plus one with her to this year’s Oscar Nominees Luncheon on Tuesday.

Todd Gilchrist In 2021, the ways in which women can define themselves, their identities and their successes is more complex and diverse than ever before, but tradition — and the expectation of adherence to that tradition — continues to exert a powerful influence on how easily or confidently these individuals navigate the spaces they’re creating for themselves.Many of the most memorable stories told on screen this year examined that topic, portraying women of all different ages as they reckon with the roles that society believes they should fill, which come with duties their culture or beliefs tells them they must fulfill, or that lead them down paths, personally or professionally, that the world pressures them to follow. And judges mercilessly when they don’t.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle EditorJessica Chastain knew she wanted to make a movie about Tammy Faye Bakker’s life when she was watching the documentary “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and saw the late televangelist’s 1985 interview on “The PTL Club” with Steve Pieters, a gay minister who was diagnosed with HIV.“I was just like, whoa, we were in a time in this nation where the government isn’t acknowledging the AIDS epidemic and here is this Christian woman in a community, a very conservative televangelist [community], and she is being rebellious,” Chastain tells me on this week’s episode of the “Just for Variety” podcast. “And she’s bringing Steve Pieters on.

Jessica Chastain poses for a few pics ahead of her appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in New York City on Wednesday afternoon (September 15).

Michael Appler In 1985, after thousands of gay men had died of AIDS in the U.S., Tammy Faye Bakker interviewed an openly gay pastor with HIV/AIDS named Steve Pieters on a national Christian television program.“How sad that we as Christians, who are supposed to love everyone, are so afraid of an AIDS patient that we will not put our arm around them and tell them that we care,” Tammy, through teary eyes and smudged makeup, said then on The PTL Club, the televangelist network she founded with husband Jim Bakker and which spectacularly collapsed after he was convicted of mass fraud and conspiracy.In “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” a new biographical film starring Jessica Chastain as Tammy and Andrew Garfield as Jim Bakker that interview with Pieters