Amanda, who joined Dallas for part of the interview, said she agreed with what Dallas said “on a macro level” and said, “I feel like with you, Russell, it was a lot of your passion that seemed to drive a lot of your choices in life.”
So Brand was “passionate,” as well as “wildly curious, and what I believe about God [that] then intersected was that you were sincere,” she told him. “Like you were a sincere seeker. And so when you see passion and you see curiosity and you see sincerity, you go, ‘Oh, well, the Lord says [that] he’ll be found.’”
“There’s no doubt that there is a Christian revival taking place across the world,” Brand told Dallas at the beginning of the interview before Amanda joined them. “People are talking about Christianity in a way that—I mean, I know people that have been Christian for a long time. I’ve not been Christian very long, so I can only get my diagnosis from people that know more about it than me.”
Brand believes there is a “renewed global interest in Christianity” that is inseparable from the success of “The Chosen,” and he asked Dallas, “How are you managing your tremendous success, impact and influence?” Brand observed the success could make Dallas feel “important,” so he asked, “How are you marshaling your leadership and the power that it has granted you? How are you handling that?”
“Well, thank you,” said Dallas. “That’s very kind. I would say the opposite has happened, the opposite of feeling any kind of responsibility or feeling any sense of pride.”
“I used to chase this kind of thing all the time. I mean, you know, 10 years ago, the notion of having a show that had reached this level of success would have been the dream,” Dallas said, “and the meetings that I’m having with people in Hollywood—I would have killed to work, to meet with the people who were working for the people that I’m meeting with. And God took all that away from me.”
Dallas said that a “brokenness” preceded his success, which he guessed Brand could relate to in Brand’s own spiritual journey. “Now, I’ve been a believer as long as I can remember, but I still needed to break, I still needed to surrender,” said Dallas. “And I didn’t do that until my 40s, when my feature film that I was all excited about completely failed at the box office.”
“I was faced with: I might never do this again. I might not get another chance to do this again, and could I be okay with that?” he said.
“The Chosen” creator has shared elsewhere that his film that failed was “The Resurrection of Gavin Stone.”
“And when God just, you know, met me there, more than I’d probably ever experienced God before,” Dallas said, “the brokenness and the humility are what prepared me for this. They’re what tilled the soil for handling ‘success.’”
