As a teenager, actor and comedian George Lopez said he often thought he couldn’t imagine life without his grandmother, who raised him.
“When I was growing up, my grandmother was tough on me,” he told Faithwire. “But also, at times, I would look at her, when I was in junior high and high school, and I would look at her and say to myself, ‘If anything happens to her, I don’t know what I would do. I’d be lost without her.’”
Lopez, star of the new movie “Walking with Herb,” said he never had to figure that out as a kid.
Before she passed away in 2009, though, Lopez recalled his wife at the time telling him to go visit his grandmother, Benita, at the hospital to “thank her and tell her everything you want to tell her.”
“I did, and she passed two hours after that,” he said. “The first time she left me was when I told her it was OK to leave me.”
The 60-year-old celebrity encouraged people to “appreciate” those they care about “and be there for them and tell them how much you care about them.”
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“So when they do go, you’re not living a life of regret, because also people do that,” he said. “Like I remember, somebody would always fight with their mom, and I would say, ‘Instead of trying to change her, just be with her. You’re not going to change her.’ They never understood that, and when she was gone, [they said], ‘You know, you were right. Why would I try to change someone instead of just sitting there with them?’”
That’s exactly what Lopez’s character, Herb, does in his new film. Sent as a divine “messenger” to an amateur golfer (Edward James Olmos), Herb helps guide the main character through a crisis of faith in the wake of a tragic loss.
Lopez’s character does that for Joe Amable-Amo by just showing him the things already there around him.
“It’s probably the biggest part that I’ve had and I think the most meaningful part I’ve had in a film, because there’s nothing of me that anybody recognizes in this movie that will be familiar to them — it’s all new to them,” said Lopez, whose known for his brash persona and light-hearted eponymous sitcom from the early 2000s.
Growing up, Lopez said, he rebelled against the idea of having faith in God.
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His grandparents, he recalled, pushed him to trust in God, and it would just make him want to reject it even more. Looking back, the comedian said, it would have been more helpful for them to just be present through difficult times, rather than trying to “drill [faith] into me.”
“I knew that things didn’t happen by accident and I knew that things were connected and, as I got older, and started to really see it, I believed it even more,” Lopez said. “So I’ve been a believer.”
“Walking with Herb,” based on a book of the same name by Joe S. Bullock, is in theaters nationwide May 7.