Not every Black actor is called to play a church pastor on screen. But those who get the part, get the part. Arsenio Hall, a preacher’s kid, channeled his father while hamming it up as Reverend Brown in Coming to America. Courtney B Vance had flashbacks of his childhood churchgoing experience while portraying the conflicted Reverend Biggs in The Preacher’s Wife, and even took the extra step of getting baptized before shooting began. “When we were filming at the church and the choir was singing,” Vance told Jet magazine in 1996, “the Holy Spirit took over. This isn’t just a movie. It’s the Holy Spirit working.”
Even actors in small-screen pastor roles rise to the occasion. All summer I’ve struggled to stop myself from rewinding this old JamIe Foxx Show clip of him as the flask-shooting Reverend Alizé, a character you have to believe sprang from formative experiences as a church band member in rural Texas. (“He coulda been cloudy as Kahlúa,” Alizé says while officiating the funeral of a man he’s desperately trying not to disparage, “but Jevus made him clear as vodka!”) For so many Americans the Black church is a rite of passage of joys, conflicts and contradictions – which is what makes preacher portrayals so magnetic, after all. They take you back. Hence why Black church is such an enduring screen trope and, increasingly, real life imitates art.
