By Gavin Boyle
Scott Foley discussed his role in Wonder Project’s new faith-based drama IT’S NOT LIKE THAT and why he hesitated to take on the show’s lead part.
“The fact that he was a pastor was a double-edged sword for me,” Foley told Us Weekly. “I’m not a religious adult. I was religious as a kid. My family was religious so it’s something that I am not wholly unfamiliar with.”
Foley plays Malcolm, a recently widowed pastor and dad-of-three.
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“He’s a community leader and he’s a faith leader as a pastor. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with that but there’s also — more importantly — a faith and a belief that I find endlessly interesting for me to try to wrap my head around,” the actor continued. “And then I had to embody a character who has that faith. It’s different that any character I’ve played and it’s much more complicated than I thought it would be.”
Despite the lack of faith in his personal life, Foley does a great job portraying a faith-filled character who needs a lot of help. A portion of Movieguide®’s review reads:
Episode 1 of IT’S NOT LIKE THAT does a good job introducing a large cast of characters and their individual problems while keeping the action moving. As Malcolm and Lori, Scott Foley and Erinn Hayes give excellent, moving performances, and the cast of younger actors are impressive. Episode 1 of IT’S NOT LIKE THAT has a strong Christian, moral, pro-family worldview. People discuss their faith, attend church, and give or listen to sermons. There is, however, one light obscenity, a reference to a past incident about a sexual question at a bar, and some scenes about bullying, lying and divorce.
Malcolm reveals the reality that media often misses, which is that leaders in the church are human and deal with human problems themselves. When this is included in the media, it is often through a scandal, but in Malcom’s case, he is simply trying to move on from the hardest moment of his life — and leans on others while doing so.
“At the end of the first episode, Malcolm’s been struggling to write his sermon, his first sermon back after his wife passed away,” Foley said. “And he does something that almost every man I know doesn’t — and should — which is ask for help.”
“He asks for help in a very public way,” he continued. “That’s a really hard thing to do as a person, as a man. But then he says, ‘I’m going to lean on you guys.’ I think that’s a real representation of the kind of person Malcolm is.”
This portrayal is extremely important as it helps the Christian viewers remember that just because they are leaning on the Lord, it does not mean they do not need human help as well. In fact, many times God helps us by placing people in our lives who make a major difference.
The first two episodes of IT’S NOT LIKE THAT are now available through Prime Video and Wonder Project, and new episodes will be released every Sunday through the second weekend of March.
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