The Gwen Shamblin Lifetime movie trailer is here amen!

Publish date: 2024-06-25

"The higher the hair, the closer to God."

Gwen Shamblin — the bouffant-sporting megachurch leader and weight-loss guru who died in a 2021 plane crash — is getting the Lifetime movie treatment, and EW has the exclusive first look at the trailer.

Premiering Feb. 4, Gwen Shamblin: Starving for Salvation stars Jennifer Grey as the controversial religious leader who built an empire by combining a diet plan called the Weigh Down Workshop with Biblical teachings. As Shamblin tells her flock in the trailer, "Your stomach doesn't need food — it needs God."

Revered as a prophet by her congregation, Shamblin — who wrote several books including The Weigh Down Diet and Rise Above — continued to amass power and money after founding the Remnant Fellowship Church in 1999. Starving for Salvation chronicles Shamblin's rise to megachurch fame, the harsh treatment of those who questioned her methods, and the shocking crash that killed Shamblin and six other church leaders, including her second husband, former Tarzan: The Epic Adventures star Joe Lara.

Lifetime's movie is the first scripted dramatization of Shamblin's rise and fall; it follows the five-part HBO Max docuseries The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin, which premiered in 2021.

Gwen Shamblin: Starving for Salvation premieres Saturday, February 4 at 8/7c. on Lifetime.

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