Actor Robert Duvall Wove Faith And Flawed Humanity Into His Films
(ESSAY) The death of Robert Duvall on Sunday at age 95 marks the passing of one of America’s most searching and soulful actors — a man whose performances were forged not only from craft, but from conviction.
For more than six decades, Duvall inhabited characters with a depth that suggested something spiritual at work beneath the surface. From Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird” to Tom Hagen in “The Godfather,” Duvall’s art consistently revealed a fascination with grace and redemption.
“To the world, he was an Academy Award-winning actor, a director, a storyteller. To me, he was simply everything,” his wife Luciana Duvall wrote in a Facebook post. “His passion for his craft was matched only by his deep love for characters, a great meal, and holding court. For each of his many roles, Bob gave everything to his characters and to the truth of the human spirit they represented.”
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Yet nowhere was Duvall’s spiritual hunger evident than in his one big passion project, “The Apostle,” the 1997 film he wrote, directed, financed and starred in after years of rejection from Hollywood. In 1998, the film was widely lauded, with Duvall earning a best actor nomination.
Duvall often said that learning a role meant far more than memorizing lines. He immersed himself in a character’s dreams, fears and humanity, believing that in the process of transformation, “a remarkable thing can happen.” Oftentimes, he discovered something about himself.
That instinct can be traced to his childhood. Raised in a churchgoing Navy family during World War II, Duvall witnessed firsthand the quiet power of faith. While his father served on a ship in the North Atlantic, his mother would sometimes wake up during the night with an urgent desire to pray. On one such night, she sensed danger. Later, the family learned his father had narrowly escaped a German torpedo. For the young Duvall, faith was not abstraction — but a lived experience.
Though he later described himself as “not much for organized religion,” and identified with Christian Science without attending church on a regular basis, faith remained a steady undercurrent. In a 2008 interview with The Christian Science Journal, he called Christian Science “the final revelation,” crediting it with deepening his understanding of God.
That longing for authenticity crystallized in 1962 when, researching a role, he wandered into a Pentecostal church in Hughes, Arkansas, as part of his research for an off-Broadway role. He had grown up knowing the inward life of faith, but what he encountered there was something different — an outward explosion of joy.
“The air crackled with the Spirit,” he recalled.
That’s where the idea for “The Apostle” was born. For years, however, Hollywood resisted as executives insisted audiences did not want to see religion. Duvall disagreed.
“There was a certain simplicity and understanding,” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times. “And also the feeling of the folklore. Preaching is one of the great American art forms. The rhythm, the cadence. And nobody knows about it except the preachers themselves.”
When studios refused to finance the project, he put up his own money and filmed in Louisiana for seven weeks. Many of the roles were filled by real preachers and congregants.
“True faith is something that’s hard to duplicate,” he said at the time.
Against expectations, the production – after the script had taken him 12 years to produce into a movie – unfolded smoothly. No disasters. No breakdowns. To Duvall, the whole thing felt providential.
The result was a portrait of a deeply flawed Pentecostal preacher — both a sinner and servant — struggling toward grace. The film earned him another Oscar nomination and widespread acclaim. But more importantly, it fulfilled a calling he had carried for decades.
Now that Duvall is gone, what remains is not only a body of extraordinary work, but the witness of a man who believed that art and faith could be intertwined. He showed that belief need not be loud to be real, nor perfect to be powerful. It can be both flawed and exuberant. It can be inward and outward at once. For Duvall, the greatest discovery he ever made was that faith — long present, sometimes dormant — could come alive in unexpected places. And through his work, he invited audiences to discover it, too.
In one of his most moving recollections, Duvall described visiting multiple churches in New York, ending at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. As the congregation sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” he said he felt connected to the Lord in a way he never had before — deep within.
“Yes, I thought, we're all kin through Jesus,” Duvall said in 1988. “Not just what we read about him in the Bible, but who He is. That was the secret to powerful faith, the power I wanted to convey in my movie.”
Clemente Lisi serves as executive editor at Religion Unplugged.