After six years in the making, “His Only Son” almost didn’t reach the finish line, because the writer and director of the film, David Helling, couldn’t find an actor to play the lead role.
Sitting inside Angel Studios in Provo, Utah, Helling told CBN’s Faithwire the ultimate casting of Lebanese actor Nicolas Mouawad to play Abraham was divinely inspired and evidence of “the Lord’s hand” on the project.
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“I had looked at over 1,700 applicants for the role of Abraham — no one fit the bill at all,” Helling said of casting for the movie, which tells the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac, found in Genesis 22.
He recalled being approached by “His Only Son” producer Roman Medjanov, who told Helling that, if he wasn’t able to find an actor to play Abraham, the film would have to be delayed, a prospect the movie’s creator felt was a certain death knell.
Helling said he immediately took the problem to the Lord in prayer.
“You know who Abraham is,” he recalled praying to God. “You know who You’ve declared to play Abraham, so please just show me who that person is.”
The director, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, started looking again for an actor to play the Old Testament character. And unbeknownst to him, Mouawad — a successful actor in the Middle East who had never been cast for an English-speaking role — had created an IMDb page one day before Helling found him.
After reaching out to Mouawad, and sending him a scene for a reading, Helling described the audition video he received as “exactly as I envisioned it when I was writing the film.”
“I’m talking about the intonation, the pauses in his speech, even his mannerisms and his hands,” the director said. “It was like, ‘This is exactly like I envisioned when I wrote it.’ So I had to get him.”
He went on to say, “It’s just proof that this is totally the Lord’s hand on the project. I mean, you see His hand throughout the whole thing.”
Mouawad, a Christian, described the way his connection to the film came about as “beautiful.”
CBN News previously reported the film was created on a $250,000 budget. Now, following Easter weekend, the Angel Studios movie has earned more than $11 million at the box office.
Helling was first inspired to write the script from the deserts of Iraq, where the Lord impressed the story of Abraham and Isaac on his heart. He has spent the last six years bringing the Old Testament account to cinematic life. Intent on ensuring the movie stayed true to the Bible, the filmmaker was anchored by Proverbs 9:10, in which Solomon wrote, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (NLT).
“To enter in through prayer always and to kind of deplete any of your own imaginations or [thoughts of] ‘Oh, this would be cool to inject into the text,'” Helling said of how he worked to stay scripturally accurate. “You want to start with the bones of the text of Scripture first, and you don’t ever want to put those out of joint.”
“I’ve had experience with this over the years,” he continued, “because my heart cry is to illustrate and exposit the biblical narrative through film. That’s what I’ve been doing for nearly the last 15 years.”
Such a task, Helling admitted, can be overwhelming, “if you’re relying on yourself.”
“But when you rest in the sovereignty of the Lord, and you seek Him, and you’re confessing your sins, and you’re trying to live in obedience, then you can rest in the fact that He’s gonna lead you down the right path.”
You can listen to more of our conversation on a recent episode of CBN’s “Quick Start.”
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