Lifetime has released the trailer for its upcoming “ripped from the headlines” film, starring Jennifer Grey as the late diet guru and church leader Gwen Shamblin Lara.
The one-minute official trailer for “Gwen Shamblin: Starving for Salvation,” which premieres on Feb. 4, shows the “Dirty Dancing” star transform into the controversial figure and sport her voluminous blond hairstyles.
“Satan does not give up,” Lara says on stage as the clip begins.
She is then shown telling a room filled with people, “This demon isn’t food. It’s sin.”
Before she weighs herself, Gwen is heard saying, “I’ve always had what I would call a crush on God.”
The trailer also includes some of the late religious leader’s ideologies, like “I love the scale and the scale loves me” and “Your stomach doesn’t need food. It needs God.”
In other standout moments, Lara leads sermons as a congregation applauds her and she officiates weddings for multiple couples.
Lifetime described the film as a depiction of how Lara “positioned herself as God’s prophet and preached the virtues of being thin.”
With her dramatic hair and makeup, Grey fully embodies Lara, who died in May 2021. Lara, her husband, former “Tarzan: The Epic Adventures” star Joe Lara, and five others were killed when their small private plane crashed into a Tennessee lake.
The 62-year-old actor has been teasing her portrayal of the faith-based diet leader for months. On Nov. 21, she uploaded a photo to Instagram of her looking unrecognizable in a wig and makeup similar to Lara’s eccentric looks.
“Call me gwen,” she wrote in the caption.
On Nov. 30, she shared an Instagram photo of her on set with Vincent Walsh, who portrays Joe Lara.
Grey announced that production had ended and thanked the cast and crew for their work on the film.
In 2021, HBO Max released episodes from its docuseries about Lara titled “The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin.” The five-part series explained how the diet guru built a career and a fortune after creating the Brentwood, Tennessee-based Remnant Fellowship Church in 1999 and then developing her faith-based diet program called “Weigh Down Workshop.”
Variety has reported that the streaming platform will follow its docuseries with a scripted adaptation starring Sarah Paulson.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
