Martin Sheen replaces Robert Redford as Oral Roberts

Last updated on: January 5, 2017 at 10:49 pm by Peter T. Chattaway

Martin Sheen replaces Robert Redford as Oral Roberts 2017-01-05T22:49:48-08:00 Peter T. Chattaway

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Three years ago, I passed along a news item to the effect that Robert Redford was in talks to play televangelist Oral Roberts in a movie called Come Sunday. Today, Deadline reports that the part will go to Martin Sheen instead — and that’s not the only thing that has changed about the film since the last time I blogged it.

Back then, the film was going to be directed by Jonathan Demme, and it was going to star Jeffrey Wright as Carlton Pearson, a Pentecostal minister who was a rising star within his denomination until he revealed that he no longer believed in Hell — a decision that forced Roberts, his mentor, to turn against him. Now the film is being directed by Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace), and Pearson will be played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who just finished playing Peter in Mary Magdalene.

The script for Come Sunday is by Marcus Hinchey (All Good Things) and is based on an episode of This American Life — archived here — that first aired in 2005.

To my knowledge, Oral Roberts has never been played by an actor in a movie before — though actors have played other real-life televangelists. Kevin Spacey and Bernadette Peters played Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker in Fall from Grace, a 1990 TV-movie. Richard Paul played Jerry Falwell in that film and then reprised the role in 1996’s The People vs. Larry Flynt. Alec Baldwin played Jimmy Swaggart pre-television in the 1989 movie Great Balls of Fire! And if you count Billy Graham as a “televangelist” (he may not have had a daily talk show, but he did produce a regular series of TV specials), there was an entire biopic devoted to his early years in 2008. (He was also depicted in at least one satire of the Nixon administration in the early 1970s.)

Oral Roberts and the Bakkers (and others?) are also slated to appear in a biopic of comedian Sam Kinison that has been in the works for the past several years.

The question of whether Hell exists has been debated increasingly in the decade or so since Pearson was formally declared a heretic by the Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops. Rob Bell had a falling out with his own church and was rejected by some evangelicals after he expressed his own openness to universal reconciliation in the book Love Wins in 2011. And my fellow Patheos blogger Kevin Miller stirred things up with his documentary Hellbound? in 2012.

So expect the debate to continue if Come Sunday does, in fact, get made.

— The image above shows Martin Sheen playing a priest in last year’s The Vessel*.*

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