The Billy Graham biopic Billy: The Early Years is currently scheduled to come out in October, and when I first mentioned it here back in March, I noted that the only other films to have featured actors playing Billy Graham seem to be parodies of the Nixon administration produced in the early 1970s.
But today, while reading this article on Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush biopic in the Sunday Times, it dawned on me that there might be another actor playing Billy on the big screen this year. In a review of an early draft of the script, the Times notes:
The relationship between father and son begins to shift when W gives up drinking after waking up with a huge hangover the day after his 40th birthday. He also has a religious conversion. On a walk with the Rev Billy Graham in 1985, he says, “There’s this darkness that follows me. People say I was born with a silver spoon, but they don’t know the burden that carries.”
This got me curious: Was the character of Billy Graham still in the script? And if so, who is playing him?
The IMDb entry on this film is no help. It doesn’t list the character at all, but it does list a character named “Evangelical 2”. So where is Evangelical 1? Obviously, there are gaps on that page.
However, a bit of Googling turned up this interview with Oliver Stone in Screen Daily, which touches on this topic:
Meanwhile Stacy Keach plays a composite of evangelical ministers, including Billy Graham and Jim Robison, who influenced Bush in his conversion to Christianity.
“Richard Nixon very much invoked the silent majority and the friendship of Billy Graham, but Mr Bush has taken (religion) further than ever (into government) and so we have to dramatise that,” says Stone. “We must on the surface take his conversion seriously. It is the centrepiece of his change. At the age of 40, he was a drinker and he changed quite radically over a period of four years, so something happened to him. Whether he became the same person on the other side of the coin is an interesting issue and I examine that too. Some of the characteristics, however, never disappeared such as the temperament, the anger and the impatience.”
A composite, eh? I guess they’ve tweaked that part of the script a bit. Too bad, I was looking forward to seeing another straightforward portrayal of Billy Graham this autumn. But it will be interesting to see how many of Billy’s characteristics come through in the character who does appear in the film.
The photo above, by the way, is of Stacy Keach, and is taken from the website for The Word of Promise, an audio Bible that he was involved with recently. Keach is also known to Bible-movie buffs for playing Barabbas in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977). He also played Martin Luther in the film adaptation of John Osborne’s Luther (1973; my review).
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