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Hilary Swank, Alan Ritchson Talk ‘Beautifully Depicted’ Messages in ORDINARY ANGELS
By Movieguide® Contributor
ORDINARY ANGELS stars Hilary Swank and Alan Ritchson recently sat down with Movieguide® to talk about the movie’s inspiring themes of receiving help and developing faith.
“It’s just as important that you’re willing to receive help as a broken individual,” Ritchson said about the movie’s theme in an interview posted on Wednesday. “A lot of us like to think, like, I’m not worthy of that. That’s right, let’s wait till I’m cleaned up and worthy of accepting help, you know, and that completely defeats the purpose of it.”
“It completely defeats the purpose,” Swank jumped in. “So the idea of like wherever you are right now, in this moment, you can help someone else, and you can also receive that help, and that’s one of the messages of the movie that is so…beautifully depicted.”
Movieguide®’s description of the movie reads:
ORDINARY ANGELS is a very exciting, heartrending movie. The movie opens with a little baby girl being born to Ed Schmitt and his wife. Regrettably, some three years later, the mother dies. Then, Ed finds out his young daughter, Michelle, is dying of a failing kidney. Sharon, a woman with low self-esteem and a drinking problem working in a local beauty shop, decides to help. She holds a fundraiser for Michelle and helps Ed with his hospital bills, but Ed doesn’t trust her. Things come to a head when Ed tries to rush Michelle to a hospital in a blizzard to get her a kidney transplant.
Swank felt inspired by the movie’s reality-based message.
“I mean, you know, it’s like this is real life. It’s real life, and it’s all captured in this capsule of two hours that deals with so many issues, including organ transplants and the importance of being an organ donor and how that can save a life,” she shared. “And so all of those issues were part of why I wanted to be in this film.”
Ritchson also felt inspired by its real-life themes and essential elements of faith.
“I mean, look, I’m gonna be completely honest. I did not—when I read this script for the first time, I didn’t say to myself, like this is a great faith-based movie. This was just a compelling, heartbreaking true story that had a hopeful and inspiring message, you know?” he said.
“And yes, it felt very wholesome to me, but this is, you know, this is a couple of people’s real lives, and they made powerful strides towards reaching our fullest potential, you know?” he explained. “So the closest thing that came to faith, to me, was, you know, the fact that they sort of asked the questions of God like, ‘why?’…I was afraid that that was actually going to get pulled out, that those questions of doubt…because Ed is like hesitant to even walk in a church when he’s like dealing with so much pain and so angry at God.”
The lead character’s doubt, not to be confused with disbelief, shows the reality of faith—that there will be questions. Pastor Jeffery Curtis Poor explains the relationship between doubt and faith: “The opposite of faith is certainty; where there is certainty, there is no room for faith.”
Ritchson continued, “That’s the real piece of faith—doubt—that I think makes it a true, honest faith-based film, and I was worried that would be taken away, but I’m glad it stayed.”
“I just want to say if you have doubt, which I’m sure if this is a large community, there are many people who have doubt about whether God exists or whether he’s present in our lives or working… for our good, and that’s not a problem,” Ritchson told listeners. “That’s where faith begins. That’s where true faith and relationship begin, and I think God welcomes those kinds of battles.”
Jon Gunn, ORDINARY ANGELS’ director and producer, recently told Cinema Daily why he was inspired to direct the movie: “It’s a story that needed to be told. It’s an unbelievable true story that was inspiring but also just really honest and filled with real human drama.”
ORDINARY ANGELS will come to theaters on Friday, Feb. 23, and will be available to stream on Peacock in August.
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