Tony Hale on Parenting, Powerlessness, and Processing Grief

The Russell Moore Show

Christianity Today, Russell Moore

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 914 Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Maybe you know Tony Hale as the bumbling Buster Bluth on Arrested Development. Or maybe you know him as the bag-toting assistant to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Selina Meyer on Veep. You might even know him as the googly-eyed Forky in Toy Story 4 or Riley’s Fear on Inside Out. No matter how you’ve come across him before, perhaps you haven’t heard him like this. In this episode, Tony Hale joins Russell Moore for a candid conversation about anxiety, art, faith—and why he’s drawn to characters who never quite have it all together. Hale opens up about his personal journey through grief and doubt, and how these experiences shaped both his faith and his creativity. He reflects on the healing power of storytelling, the importance of making space for emotions we often suppress, and what it means to parent children through grief and suffering. Together, Moore and Hale explore the themes of Hale’s new family film Sketch, a story about a girl who processes loss by drawing monsters. But this isn’t just a kids’ movie—it’s an honest look at pain, beauty, and what it means to sit with discomfort. Hale shares why he wanted to make a film that respects the emotional complexity of children and adults alike. They also talk about the influence of Tim Keller, Tony’s early years as an actor, the inner development of his iconic roles (be aware, there could be some spoilers!), and how to choose roles and shape a career as a Christian in Hollywood. And be sure to listen until the end, when Tony shares insights on how to be the one Christian among nonbelievers and how to show the love of Christ with authenticity. This is a warm, thoughtful conversation about surrender, sacred imagination, and how telling the truth might be one of the most redemptive acts we can offer the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you in part by The Apologetics Guy Show, the podcast that helps you find clear answers to tough questions about Christianity.
0:11.1	Learn to explain your faith with courage and compassion.
0:14.5	Join Moody Bible Institute professor Dr. Mikhail del Rosario at Apologeticsky.com.
0:22.6	I am powerless, and it's a really hard thing to feel because I want to control.
0:28.6	I want to like arrange the narrative how I want the narrative to be.
0:32.6	And man, letting go and surrendering to the powerlessness is terrifying, but there's a lot of freedom in it too.
0:41.3	Hello, this is Russell Moore, and this is the Russell Moore Show, brought to you by Christianity today.
0:46.3	Here, we look for signposts in a strange time by standing fast to what really matters, kingdom over culture wars, truth over tribalism,
0:56.0	pilgrimage over partisanship, sanity over cynicism, witness over winning, and Christ over everything.
1:03.0	Today we have a conversation to do just that.
1:17.8	Summer is the time for movies, and a lot of you are going to the theater a lot these days. And there's a new movie that's coming out that I want to talk about today with my guest, Tony Hale, who's a two-time Emmy Award-winning actor.
1:26.0	You know him from Arrested Development.
1:29.0	He was Gary Walsh on Deep.
1:31.5	And he has this new movie, this new project called Sketch, which I just watched last week.
1:39.1	And we're going to talk about, it's hard for me to know exactly how to describe it to you without spoilers but we
1:46.6	will try to do that tony thanks for being here thank you for having me before we talk about the
1:52.7	movie what is your spiritual background actually i was raised a lot of things i was a bit of a
1:58.2	mutt when it comes to faith. My dad was in the military,
2:01.4	so I moved like seven times before the seventh grade. But I think there was some Lutheran
2:07.1	in there. There was some Presbyterian. And then when we moved to Florida, we went to a Baptist
2:11.4	church. And then I went, and I'm back to Presbyterian. So I came full circle.
2:16.9	Am I right that for a while you were at Redeemer Church in New York?
	...

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