This is undaunted Life a Man's Podcast.

I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.

Let's get into it.

All right, guys, you've got a special guest on the podcast today.

His name is Paul Searsad.

So he's a director, writer, showrunner, and executive producer of the new Angel Studio series called Testaments.

So I actually want to read the series synopsis to you here. The Book of Acts explosively reimagined in an alternate modern era. A resurrection

sparks a movement that turns the world upside down, spreading hope amid chaos. As the followers

risk everything to preach the good news, the temple races to silence them before the oppressive

imperialian regime retaliates. But public miracles,

unburied secrets, and fractured loyalties force both sides to confront the true cost of their

choices. And so in this particular interview, we certainly talk about the series and we talk about

everything there. But we get into, okay, he was actually a trained actor. So basically think of the

London equivalent of Juilliard right here in America. That's where he trained as an actor. And so we talked about, okay, at what point did you realize you didn't want to be a storyteller in front of the camera, but you wanted to be a storyteller on the other side of the camera, okay? And so how do you, you know, go from doing a short film to doing a feature film to doing a series, what it's like working with Angel.

But then when we get into a series like this, obviously I just read the synopsis, this is not like a

series that's set in first century, Jerusalem or Galilee or any of these types of areas.

And so it's not going to have the same feel as something like The Chosen, which is trying to be like to the date that it's representing.

This, again, is kind of reimagined. So as we talked about in the interview, it's kind of a post-dispopian version of the Book of Acts. And so we didn't really get into any spoilers, but we just talked about, you know, how difficult it is to kind of write something like that. Like, how do you approach something where you're literally like reimagining or or stretching the text and all that? And he had a very interesting answer to that. But also, how do you cast something like this? Because you've got, you know,

Saul of Tarsus, you've got Stephen, you've got Peter, you've got Mary Magdalene, you've got

Camille, you've got all these other different people. And I think it's very, very important to listen to his answer on that because I thought it was just great. Because again, this is not a guy in an organization that has all this Bukuz of money. And so they can get whatever actor and whatever actress they want to sign on for this project. So in a lot of ways, they're having to find diamonds in the rough. And the guy that plays Saul in the series is just spectacular. And the way that he found Saul, I thought was a very, very interesting story. And then we talk about what is going to be the future of the series and kind of where this will all go. So guys, very, very interesting interview. So I'm not going to keep in front of you any longer. without further ado let's get into it paul surstad welcome to undaunted life a man's podcast man great to be

thanks for having me man man i've been nervous all week about the last name because i was like i was trying

it out all the different ways in my head because it's like you sound british but you're not british but

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