Stage and Screen Actor Jason Hildebrand

Jason Hildebrand, a stage and film actor and corporate consultant from Canada, is also a loving dad to his daughters. Based in Toronto, Canada, Jason's work takes him around the world. A versatile writer and actor, some of his work requires him to portray as many as 23 characters in the same performance. Jason and I met at the Gideon Media Arts Conference and Film Festival and immediately connected at a networking workshop. We sat down one afternoon to talk about the various facets of his work, being a father, and relating to our Father.

On Christian Art           Jason's Big Passion

You have a powerful one-man stage show of The Prodigal. How did it evolve?

Jason:    A friend of mine who's a denominational District Superintendent was doing a prayer retreat about ten years ago. The fuel for his prayer retreat was Henri Nouwen's book Return of the Prodigal Son based on Rembrandt's painting from the Luke 15 parable. He called me and said he was doing this retreat with a bunch of pastors and asked if I wanted to do something that would go with the retreat.

When I said OK he sent me this book and I read it and spent lots of time praying about it. I wrote these three characters as an inspiration from the book. I've also always loved the Keith Green song The Prodigal Son Suite. I took those two things and spent a lot of time looking at the Rembrandt painting.

After that retreat, it stayed on the shelf for a while, which is pretty unusual. About five years ago, I took it back off the shelf and started touring with it. All of a sudden, God started doing this incredible thing. I'd perform and people would be broken by the story. God would do these things I was in awe of. I'd go home after a performance and be shocked. People's lives were transformed. I'd just go do my job the best I could do it. There's something about this story, and when the Spirit fills the story, it’s pretty magnificent.

A couple of years ago I finished my previous project, which was based on Donald Miller's book Blue Like Jazz. I'd done a multi-media one-man show of that and turned it into film. I made a DVD of it. I'd never raised money before for anything, but Blue Like Jazz went from a $2000 project to a $150,000 project in the course of a year. It's nothing I could ever have planned because I wouldn't have done it if I'd thought it was ever going to be that big, you know?

In the process I found these donors, many who didn't know me, but found them through these connections. We raised $90,000 from these donors for the project. The other $60,000 came from revenue from the tour.

I felt The Prodigal was very cinematic. It's very cinematic in the way I tell the story, and I had this idea in my head that we could shoot it in an old theater, and the theater would be almost like the fourth character. I put it on the shelf because after doing Blue Like Jazz, I realized how much it would cost.

I've been in the film industry for a while and I know things cost a lot of money. I've seen so much poorly done "Christian art" that I didn't want to do it for a low budget. I didn't want to put it out there unless it was amazing.

So I was talking to my biggest donor and told them about this prodigal thing. He asked if I'd come to their church and perform it live, and I said, "Sure." So I went to their church and they were blown away. They asked, "How much do you need?" and I didn't know, but made a budget of $25,000 for it. They almost wrote me a check for the entire amount of that. Then I realized how much it was going to cost and ended up being a $70,000 project. They gave me more money. Then other people found out about it and gave me money. People who had no idea what I needed gave me the exact amount of money needed. So then we shot it, and I learned so much from that.

It's been the coolest thing. So now I have it and wonder what to do with it. The biggest thing I kept hearing was to take it to film festivals. So I took it to some festivals and it started winning. The Gideon is the fifth festival it's won, and some of them have even been secular. It's mind-boggling to me.

What I love the most is that this story is speaking to people. I worked really hard to make sure I had really artistic people working on it because I wanted, to the best of my ability, to make it something I wouldn't be embarrassed to bring to any of my friends. I know a lot of folks who are filmmakers and actors that don't have any relationship to God, and I don't want to give them anything I wouldn't endorse.

When we did the film launch in Toronto, a couple of hundred people came to that, Christians and non-Christians, and everybody liked it. The non-Christians had a totally different perspective on what it was, but they all liked it.

At the question and answer after the showing, one lady raised her hand and asked, "What does it feel like to play God?" I answered, "I don't know. I'm not playing God, I'm playing the father. He's a symbol of God, but it's not God." My non-Christian friends had no clue what that lady was talking about.

What is the non-Christian reaction to it?

Jason:    I think everybody resonates with this story. Everybody gets that they're on this spectrum of older brother and younger brother, whether we have this relationship with Jesus or not. We all understand the concept of rebelliousness in different forms, and I think that we all aspire to become like the father who blesses and gives, and is gracious and loves his kids. I think that story is in the DNA of humanity.

People get the sons – they make sense to them. It's really the gospel story, and I think that as flawed as we are, we all bear that in our hearts. We all long for the Father to open his arms and run to us. People don't maybe grasp what that means in light of Christ, but they know that longing in their hearts. I think it also opens up a whole big discussion around that.

There's a line the Father says, the essence of which is, "I gave him more than I had to." Can you unpack that a bit? It was a fresh piece of the story for me.

Jason:    The line is "He took with him all that I could give him and more. He'll never know that, but I gave him more." I continually think that in my life. Just when you think God's grace is big, you discover it's even bigger. It's so huge that despite all my flaws and screwed up person, somehow in the midst of it, He says, "No, I'm going to give you more. You don't deserve it, but I don't care because you're my kid. I'm going to give you more."

With my own kids, I'll say, "I know you did that thing today and you've been sitting on your bed for the last half hour, but come on down here. Let's go out and I'll buy you a doughnut or something." It's a very small example, but for me it's the Father's heart.

When my kids look at me and they know they've screwed up, they expect sternness because they've disappointed me. What they don't expect is for me to say, "OK, I forgive you, come here." It undoes my children.

It undoes me because I move from this place of sorrow and brokenness to a place of joy in a split second. When I was writing this, I felt it was something I really wanted to say, that God is that big. And we need to be that big too. I want to be that big in my own family's life and my friends' lives.

I have this great pastor. We live in downtown Toronto and it's inner city stuff. People take everything. When you live and work among homeless folks and drug addicts and alcoholics, people take and take and take. We've been at the church 13 years, and I've watched him give his undershirt when people take the shirt off his back. That's just the kind of guy he is. I want to be like that as well, like the Father.

What's ahead for you? Do you think more film or theater work?

Jason:    It's probably a combo. My next project is probably going to be based on a Christmas monologue I do about Herod the Great. It's going to be about 15 – 20 minutes, and I'm in fundraising mode right now. We're going to shoot in the fall for a Christmas release, and I'm very excited about that. People come into the store at Christmastime expecting a cute little baby Jesus in the manager, and the end of my film is going be Herod picking up his BlackBerry and texting "Kill all the babies."

The Nativity Story brought some of that painful reality to light. It de-glamorized the birth of Christ.

Jason:    I totally agree with you. We need to move past our preconceived ideas about what that even was into the harsh reality of what really happened. One of the things I try to bring out is that now is not so different from 2000 years ago.

There are still psychotic rulers, life is still difficult, and the world is a mess. But into this mess 2000 years ago, a little baby was born that turned this world upside down. It turned Herod's world upside down and he didn't know what to do with it. He's still turning the world upside down. Nothing has changed. In fact, more and more people have found the way.

I'm excited about that, and hopefully in the winter I'm going to do a live filming of my Life of David performance. I want to do it with maybe six cameras or something really cool like that. In David, I play 23 characters with lots of accents, so you can't do it as a film. There's lots of switching back and forth, and filming it as a movie wouldn't make sense.

I'm also working on a feature that we hope to shoot in January 2011. We'll see. It takes some time.

In the midst of this, I'm still an actor that loves theater and acting. Maybe I'll end up on the set of someone's film that's at this festival. But God will do what He wants to do.

Can you talk about the executive coaching you're doing and what you're accomplishing there?

Jason:    My big passion in all my life, no matter how it's done, is to move people to a place where they can live in the fullness of who God created them to be. Part of that is coming to the awareness that we are mind-body-spirit beings. I think in the church, especially in our North American culture, we don't know what to do with our bodies because we think they'd get us into trouble. So we're a bunch of brains running around with legs.

But Jesus came as a man in a body, and I think that's an incredibly helpful thing to realize. And when we die, we're not going to be a bunch of spirit drifting around in oblivion. We're going to be given a new, glorified body.

Part of the dilemma in the church and the world (I work with church and corporate folks) is that we disconnect all these pieces of ourselves, so our body is not in harmony with how God created it. So it's much more difficult to listen to God when you're not breathing properly and your posture is terrible.

You know, they never teach you how to breathe when you're a kid, but if you watch them breathe, their little bodies are expanding and contracting. They feel things at a moment's notice. As we grow older, difficult things happen to us and we build these barriers in our lives. Some of them are physical, and we take a posture that keeps people at a distance from us, maybe a strong fight or flee posture. We breathe shallower and shallower, which disconnects us from these emotional things that are going on inside of us.

So my goal is always to get people to align their bodies as they were created to be. Then we start to breathe correctly, which allows us to connect to things that are going on inside of us. Then our mind can connect to that too, and we become a whole person.

In that place, we can find healing, and in that place God can speak into us most deeply. God can speak through anything, absolutely, but without exception, anybody I've ever worked with, as soon as their body is aligned and their three parts are working in harmony, they immediately connect with what's going on inside of them, and you get to God in about 30 seconds. Or you get to the stuff that's getting in the way of them getting to God.

So you get to the places where they were called stupid when they were six or abused when they were three. And I'm not a psychologist, so I pass them along to people who are professionals. But it's amazing how fast you get to the blockages in our lives. God wants to move us through that. We think we're really complex, but we're not really.

Part of my gifting is discernment, and a lot of that mind-body-spirit thing is an acting thing, but seen through a spiritual lens. That coupled with discernment allows me to see into people's lives in a way that I could never have imagined I could see. So when I meet with someone, I go, "Ok God, what's up?"

It's amazing how physical things actually release emotional things. We store things in our bodies, and when something tragic happens, say the death of a parent at age three, somewhere in your body that emotion is stored in a muscle. We just do that. It's the way we're designed. So when that releases, you can be back to three years old immediately, and you can be in a place to allow God to speak into that and heal that pain.

My language differs when I work in the corporate world, because I'd get fired in about 10 seconds if I talk about the Jesus stuff. That doesn't mean I don't talk about Jesus, I just don't use the same words I do in a Christian context. But the God conversation happens often. Without exception, I do a four-session consultation in the corporate world, and I'd say that about three-quarters of the way through the first session God comes up.

Maybe not framed like that, but it's there. It's funny. Our DNA yearns for who God is. It yearns to feel whole, and the first step to that is connecting to how we're made. Then it's easier to ask the big questions. But we're so wrapped up and locked up, it's hard to get there.

But society does that to us. We've got information and images coming at us 100 miles an hour, images that we shouldn't have coming into our lives. It's no wonder people can't find God because of all the noise. There's that great line in The Screwtape Letters where  Screwtape says "I long to make the whole world a noise in the end. Music and silence, how I detest them both." There's something to that. We're 100 miles an hour all the time. So we slow ourselves down and we breathe.

The Holy Spirit is wind and breath, and there's something significant to allowing Him to blow through you.

To find out more about Jason and his work, visit his website jasonhildebrand.com.

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