Jennifer Grey returns to Lifetime this weekend, closing out the network's Notorious Women programming event with Gwen Shamblin: Starving for Salvation. The film is a far cry from her last Lifetime project (The Road to Christmas in 2006) and sees her transform to portray the religious weight-loss guru. And while her performance in this film isn't the first time Grey has portrayed a real person (she played Rita Schwerner in 1990's Murder in Mississippi), tackling the larger-than-life Shamblin gave her the jitters. "I was nervous to accept it because it was such a stretch and such a departure for me," she admitted in an exclusive interview with MediaVillage. "Having never done anything like it before, this was very scary.
"When people heard I was playing her they were so excited," she continued. "I kept telling them, 'You don't understand how dark and sick this is.' That's something I really wanted to come across. The prep for this [was] scary, but I don't really believe in doing anything that isn't a little scary. If it's not, what are we doing here? So, yeah, I was scared about everything. I like to feel I can do a good job and show the scary elements of the real person from a human standpoint. How did she get this way? Where did she go wrong? What happened in her life that made her somebody in such a powerful situation, yet has lost so much and [isn't] able to see where she went off? I'm always going to try my very best in all of that."
The HBO Max documentary The Way Down: God, Greed and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin (2021) provided a deep dive into how the former pastor's wife founded The Remnant Fellowship, a Church she led based on the teachings of her best-selling weight loss book The Weigh Down Diet. Shamblin believed she had a direct hotline to God, who told her that overeating was a sin. Her flock was quick to believe, and that's something Grey found intriguing. "Why were these people willing to give themselves up for her approval?" she pondered. "That is fascinating. Nobody made them [do it]. To me it's the tragedy of how lost people are and how much they want to believe that someone has the answer to fix them. Or that they just feel like they are not lovable as they are in their imperfect state. That there is some perfection you can attain if you do what someone who is so broken tells you to do. That's the thing that makes me the saddest."
In familiarizing herself with Shamblin's story, Grey found the HBO Max documentary invaluable. However, it was a Larry King interview that provided the greatest insight. "I really got so much out of that one because I heard where she came from," she recalled. "Where God was her boyfriend and she was like, God was this handsome football player who could come in and save the day. Giving human characteristics to God, as her boyfriend, her lover, her number one? Then she meets Joe Lara (her second husband, portrayed by Vincent Walsh) and it's like she has her first orgasm. All of a sudden, it's like, "God's not my boyfriend. This guy is God." All the rules of her church changed. You can get divorced and do anything -- it was all about Joe. Then she does a talk show with him … She was older, but in those talk shows she was like a child, and he was like her daddy. I saw this little girl who was grateful to have this other experience."
Grey's physical transformation for the project is remarkable. She worked tirelessly for weeks with a dialect coach honing a southern accent and made sure the best wig maker possible was enlisted to complete the "bigger the hair, the closer to God" look. Grey believes Shamblin's mental state and its decline can be charted by her look at a particular point in her life. "You could see by the hair where her mental health was going," she said. "The fact that she thought anyone would believe her hair would come out of her head like that!
"And there were no boundaries to her lips," she added. "She was literally coloring outside of the lines. It's like she'd lost the ability to have the sense of what is a reasonable-looking human being. It became more is better, the higher, the bigger, and you could see it in the hair and the makeup. It almost felt like she was regressing to being a child again. How do you become a healthy sexual human being within a church that tells you sexuality renders you a sinner? There's so much complexity in that with body issues, becoming a woman, anorexia, yet wanting to remain a child -- it's mind boggling.
"It was exciting seeing myself [in the big wig] that first time," she admitted. "I worked with very collaborative people, and we all had ideas of how to show [her] transition and what stage she was in. The hair and makeup team worked so hard. Visualizing the trajectory of someone's mental health [where] you can see it reflected in their face, hair, body and demeanor … Drunk on power and what it means to be this larger-than-life character that people loved. In that state, she became almost superhuman."
Grey is on the fence about watching the film's premiere, preferring some distance between completing a project and revisiting it, but she's thrilled for people to see it. "When I look at pictures from this, I'm excited by it," she offered in closing. "But I know myself enough to know I love the doing of it. I'd rather [for now] just know what it felt like to be in the flow as Gwen. It was hard going.">