Duvall’s Relentless Research Gave Hollywood Its Most Human Portraits Of Faith And Flawed Men
(ANALYSIS) Before playing Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in “Apocalypse Now,” actor Robert Duvall, a U.S. Army veteran, persuaded a Vietnam War helicopter pilot to explain the realities of air cavalry life.
To portray Augustus McCrae in “Lonesome Dove,” Duvall studied equestrian with a champion show jumper and befriended West Texas football legend Sammy Baugh, mastering his bowlegged walk and slow drawl.
For his Oscar-winning role as the alcoholic country music star Mac Sledge in “Tender Mercies,” Duvall drove hundreds of miles in rural Texas, studying customs and accents. He formed a band, performed in bars and wrote two songs for the movie.
Duvall visited churches, too — preparing to embody Sledge's born-again conversion, baptism and faith. Research with believers immediately bled into the screenplay he wrote for “The Apostle,” which Duvall directed and financed. The movie earned him another Academy Award acting nomination, one of seven during a career that ended on Feb. 15, when the 95-year-old screen legend died at home on his Virginia horse farm.
That movie's complex Pentecostal preacher — Euliss F. “Sonny” Dewey — ran from the law after killing his wife's young lover with a bat.
Duvall talked with fallen ministers in prisons and took notes.
“I've met guys like that who have done all kinds of bad things, even murder and rape,” Duvall told me while promoting “The Apostle.” These preachers are “real people, and they struggle with the good and the bad that's in their own souls. They're human. I wanted to show the reality of that struggle. ... My guy makes mistakes. But he's more good than bad. He hangs on to his faith because it's real.”
In “The Apostle,” Dewey didn't run from God. He screamed his pain in prayers.
“I'm gonna yell at you 'cause I'm mad at you. I can't — take it! Give me a sign or somethin’. Blow this pain outta me. Give it to me tonight, Lord God Jehovah. If you won't give me back my wife, give me peace,” shouted Duvall, riffing on lines he first wrote in longhand.
“I don't know who's been foolin' with me. You or the devil. But I'm confused. I'm mad. I love you, Lord. I love you, but I'm mad at you. I am mad at you! So, deliver me tonight, Lord. What should I do? ... I'm a sinner, and once in a while, a womanizer, but I'm your servant! Since I was a little boy and you brought me back from the dead — I'm your servant.”
Led by dreams and omens, Dewey drives his getaway car into a river while shouting, “Glory! Glory!” Baptizing himself, he declares his rebirth as “The Apostle E.F.”
Duvall's preacher defends his interracial flock with his fists, while the faithful sing, “There's wonder-working power in the blood.”
When police lights flash in the church parking lot, he tells a convert: “I'm going to jail, and you're going to heaven. ... Glory be to God on high.”
Many of the on-screen performers weren't acting, including a Pentecostal pastor who fasted for 24 hours before the cameras rolled. Duvall stepped aside and let these voices soar.
“The Apostle” rejected “two comforting lies,” wrote Nate Showalter for his Los Angeles-based “Faith Made Audible” Substack. First, “that charisma proves holiness," and then "that sin cancels calling.” Duvall embraced that messy reality.
“Grace does not erase consequence," added Showalter in his “Broken Apostles” essay. “Calling is gift. Character is discipline. They are not the same thing. And sometimes God works through men and women who are still unfinished — still being formed, still capable of harm, still in need of mercy.”
Showalter stressed, “In Hollywood, faith is often a costume. In Duvall, it became a voice — cracked, stubborn, recognizably human.”
Over the years, Duvall told me, he learned to respect the role Christian faith plays in the lives of millions of ordinary people. Meanwhile, most of the Hollywood insiders who praised “Tender Mercies” and “The Apostle” would “never set foot inside one of these churches,” he said.
“They tell me, ‘These people frighten me.' And I say, ‘Why? These are good, moral people. You'd be in a lot more danger walking around in parts of New York City than you would be hanging out in these kinds of churches.’”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.