Morgan Freeman has wowed as God onscreen — remember that glorious white suit in Bruce Almighty? — but now his focus has shifted to understanding his higher power. On National Geographic Channel’s The Story of God With Morgan Freeman, the host travels the world to ask believers and experts for answers to some of humanity’s biggest questions: Who is God? Where did he come from? How did we get here? And why does evil exist?
The six-part docuseries — produced by Revelations Entertainment, the company Freeman founded with fellow executive producer Lori McCreary — concluded Sunday at 9 p.m. ET with a deep-dive into miracles. Read on for what Freeman and McCreary told EW about learning from their passion project, whether evil is hardwired, and much more.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What do you want viewers to take away from the finale?
MORGAN FREEMAN: What we came away with at the end of the series is the fact that all religions and beliefs share remarkable similarities, these commonalities. There they are, so we should celebrate them rather them let them cause rifts between us.
LORI McCREARY: Personally, I was enlightened about some other religious beliefs and celebrations that I didn’t know about. And I was quite frankly enlightened about some Christian beliefs that I wasn’t clear about and some places on the planet where they worship in interesting ways. I’m hoping that it leads to more conversation between people of either the same faith or different faiths [and reveals] something that we have in common that we might not have known about before.
What inspired you to pursue a docuseries about God?
McCREARY: One of the things we try to do at Revelations is … we call it revealing truths. We like to reveal truths. Especially today, with everything you hear on the news — a lot of sound bites about religious strife — it felt like it was time to have a deeper conversation about our religions around the world and our differences and our similarities. It turned out that we found a lot more similarities than differences, and that to us was a great outcome.
…
How did this project change the way that you personally think about God? Did it open you to something you hadn’t considered before?
FREEMAN: I didn’t change anything at all about how I think of God or my belief in God. It just enlightened me to how other cultures do it.
McCREARY: For me, because I’m a trained computer scientist and I come from the scientific world, there’s always been a little bit of an eyebrow raise when I spoke to people and told them that I’m a Christian. Like, “What? How does it work that you’re a Christian and scientifically-minded person?” I think, somehow, through this exploration, it really helped me reconcile those two sides of who I am — which is that you don’t have to believe in the Big Bang and not creation. You don’t have to believe in evolution or only be a creationist. You can actually be someone who believes all of this. They don’t contradict each other. That was a really great thing to confirm for me.
Click here to continue reading…
SOURCE: NICK MASLOW
Entertainment Weekly
BCNN1 WP 