Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor Kelsey Grammer, who plays pastor Chuck Smith in “Jesus Revolution,” got emotional while promoting the film on ABC’s “Live with Kelly and Ryan.”
After viewing a clip of the movie, Grammer teared up, telling hosts Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest, “I love this movie. I really love it. And when my [wife Kate and I] saw the first cut in our home, Kate said, ‘Oh my God, it’s the best thing you’ve ever done,’ and she started crying.”
Grammer described the character he plays as a “man looking for his own faith and finds it as well.”
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In the film, Smith is depicted as a pastor whose church is dwindling and can’t seem to get traction. In the midst of that, Smith believes he is on the brink of getting fired. It is then that God brings a hippie named Lonnie Frisbee into Smith’s life and he discovers a new purpose that begins a movement that is still going on today, Grammer summarized.
Grammer shared that a number of people came up to him after finding out he was portraying Smith in the movie and told him that they “listened to him all the time, he married us, or I was baptized by Chuck Smith.”
Grammer expressed that he got to see how much Smith impacted their lives by how their eyes lit up when they talked about him.
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Previously, when Grammer was asked about his faith in an interview with USA TODAY, he said, “I’ve had hiccups. I’ve had some tragic times. I have wrestled with those and worked my way through them—sometimes rejecting faith, sometimes rejecting God even, in a period of being pretty angry about it, like, ‘Where were you?’ That kind of thing. But I have come to terms with it and have found great peace in my faith and in Jesus. It’s not cavalier—Jesus made a difference in my life. That’s not anything I’ll apologize for.”
