Trent talks about his recent interview with award-winning actor and friend of America’s armed forces Gary Sinise. He also answers questions from the podcast’s patrons about grace, the messianic secret and unusual details in the book of Tobit.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hello. Welcome to another episode of The Counsel of Trent podcast. I am your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. We have a very special guest on the podcast today. He is award-winning actor and head of the Gary Sinise Foundation, Mr. Gary Sinise, here to talk to us about his book Grateful American, as well as a new film coming out this week, I Still Believe.
Trent Horn:
Gary, welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast.
Gary Sinise:
Great to be here, Trent. Thank you.
Trent Horn:
So glad you were able to come. I really enjoyed reading through your book, Grateful American, so highly recommend it to everyone. I’m going to share a little bit of the book’s description, and then we can talk about some of it related to your story that some people may have heard about and others haven’t.
Trent Horn:
According to the book’s description, as a kid in suburban Chicago, Gary Sinise was more interested in sports and rock and roll than reading or schoolwork, but when he impulsively auditioned for a school production of West Side Story, he found his purpose, or so it seemed. Within a few years, Gary and a handful of friends created what became one of the most exciting new theater companies in America.
Trent Horn:
The book details your career in acting before taking off with your role as Lieutenant Dan in the Academy Award-winning film Forrest Gump. Then after that, it was really after that role that that changed your life, and your relationship with the military community and our armed forces. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Gary Sinise:
Yeah, where to start? Yeah, I grew up in Chicago, born on the South Side of Chicago, moved to the northern suburbs. I think moving around a little bit at that time when I was younger was a little disruptive, and I had a little bit of trouble. I write about that in the book, that I was a struggling student, always getting into trouble and never very successful academically in school. I had a hard time.
Gary Sinise:
This is back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when I was in high school, and I just accidentally stumbled into a woman who was walking down the hallway. I was hanging out in the hallway. She was the drama teacher, and she told me to come and audition for West Side Story because she thought I looked like a gang member, so she told me to go. And so I did.
Trent Horn:
That’s followed your career a bit, because when I see a lot of your films… You’re such a nice guy, but you end up in these antagonist roles. One of my favorite roles is your Detective Jimmy Shaker in Ransom, opposite Mel Gibson.
Gary Sinise:
Evil Jimmy. Yes.
Trent Horn:
Evil Jimmy, yeah. So she just saw you and said, “You’d be a good bad guy in this,” or a gangster, or a wily kid.
Gary Sinise:
I was one of the gang members in… I was in the Sharks. I got a two-line part. Maybe it wasn’t even two lines. It was a couple of words, I think. And I just fell in love with it and ended up starting a theater company after that called Steppenwolf Theater, and got to play a lot of different types of parts, lot of different roles. I was used to playing a lot of different things, playing good guys and bad guys. That’s just part of the business.
Trent Horn:
There’s a lot of people who came through Steppenwolf, like John Malkovich and Joan Allen. It was big for a lot of people.
Gary Sinise:
Yeah. Laurie Metcalf was one of our original members, wonderful actress. The company now, it started in ’74, and so it’s 46 years old this year. It has been around a long time, where we’ve got a multimillion-dollar building and everything. It started with teenagers right out of high school, and now it’s this big facility. We’re actually building a new theater on the property that we own right now, so it’s an ongoing thing.
Gary Sinise:
I don’t do much with it anymore because I’m so busy with everything else. But as far as acting, the variety of roles that I played in those days at Steppenwolf gave me the education that I needed to go forward. I’ve had some really good opportunities to play some good guys and some bad guys, for sure.
Trent Horn:
Well, probably one of your most famous roles is Lieutenant Dan, or as he says in the film, Lieutenant Dan, in Forrest Gump. I love reading in the book because you said that there were other films at the time you were really hoping to get in on, and you didn’t. You did not expect how you would be received after playing this character in Forrest Gump, that it really became life-changing for you.
Gary Sinise:
Yeah. No, I didn’t. I wanted the part very badly. I remember when I read it… I had been working in support of Vietnam veterans starting in the ’80s. Then 1993, I had the opportunity to audition to play a Vietnam veteran, Lieutenant Dan, so I very much wanted to do it.
Gary Sinise:
I went in, auditioned. I was sitting at a table like this, and the director and the producer and the writer, and they’re all over there. I was pretending I was in the wheelchair, and I did a couple of those wheelchair scenes. Then they said, “Thank you. That was great. Get going,” and they brought somebody else in to read the part.
Gary Sinise:
I didn’t hear anything for, gosh, two or three weeks. I kept asking my agent, “Did you hear anything? Did they call? What are they doing? Am I going to get the part?” They said, “Well, they’re seeing a lot of other people, and they’re considering this and that.” The one thing you learn, don’t hang your hat on one part, because there’s many more actors than parts.
Gary Sinise:
I just went about my business auditioning for other things. I got very close to two movies, and I actually got a third. I screen-tested for a movie called Little Buddha that was being made by Bernardo Bertolucci, a very well-known Italian director. I screen-tested for the part of the father in that, and the other guy that screen-tested was Chris Isaak. You know, the musician?
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Gary Sinise:
Chris got the part, and I didn’t get that one. If I would’ve gotten that part, I may have done it, and it would’ve taken me out of the running for Forrest Gump because I wasn’t hearing anything.
Trent Horn:
That’s, I think, an important lesson for a lot of people listening, is that sometimes we’ll have our hopes set on something and we’ll think, “Oh, no, why didn’t God let this come into my life, or why did this get taken away?” and then it’s done for a bigger opportunity, something more important to show up for you.
Gary Sinise:
Yeah. Forrest Gump, I ended up getting. The other movies that I was hoping to get while I waited to find out about Forrest Gump, all of those did not do well at the box office. I got Forrest Gump, and it was the biggest hit of the year. Something happened. I don’t know.
Trent Horn:
What’s interesting is that after Forrest Gump, there were veterans who were just Vietnam veterans, people who were just excited to meet you, and a lot of them didn’t even know that you’re Gary Sinise. To them, you’re Lieutenant Dan, and they were just so thrilled just to meet you. Even though you’re an actor portraying a role, it had a deep resonance with a lot of them, it seemed like.
Gary Sinise:
In the military community, yeah, that part has resonated, and especially with our wounded. I have a very active service life in supporting the men and women who serve our country, and I remember the first time I walked into one of our military hospitals to visit our wounded. I was over in Germany, actually. There’s a military hospital in Germany called Landstuhl. If you’re injured in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere there, the first place you go is Landstuhl, where they stabilize you and get you prepared to come home.
Gary Sinise:
The folks that I was seeing that day were fresh off the battlefield, within a day, and they were badly wounded. I remember being quite apprehensive about it, and the first people that I saw, I was standing there in a room full of wounded guys, and somebody looked at me and recognized me and started calling me Lieutenant Dan, and then the whole mood changed in there. Everybody started laughing.
Gary Sinise:
These were all guys that were wounded. They were at the hospital. They were going to be patched up and sent back to the battlefield, and they all had that quiet thousand-yard stare. They’d been in combat. But as soon as one of them recognized Lieutenant Dan, all of a sudden it was happy in there, and everybody wanted a picture, wanted to talk about the character and wanted to…
Gary Sinise:
Then when I started going into the hospital rooms and seeing the people that were in beds, and they were missing limbs and very, very badly wounded, I found that they were interested in the story of that character, because it’s a positive story when you look at it. In the end, he’s back on new legs and he’s moving on with his life and he’s successful. I always-
Trent Horn:
He found his peace with God.
Gary Sinise:
He found his peace with God. Yes. Right. It’s a beautiful story in that way because that’s… I always talk about that because it’s a resilient story, and it’s the story that we want for everybody who goes to war. We want them to come home and be okay and move on with their lives.
Trent Horn:
Did you feel apprehensive about meeting with these soldiers, especially wounded veterans, a feeling inside something like “How can I as an actor serve you when you’ve served me and my country so much more than I have? You’re on the front lines. People are shooting at you. I just get in front of a camera.” Do you ever feel that apprehension?
Gary Sinise:
I did in the early days. I was telling somebody earlier today there was a time where I started going to visit the hospitals and visit the battlefields and the war zones and what not, and I don’t think I’m anything that special or anything like that, but I realized for a lot of folks who aren’t in the movie business or the television business, they watch our product, they watch our shows and they watch our movies and what not, meeting somebody who they recognize from the movie screen or the television screen can be special. It can be uplifting when somebody like that, who you watched on television, all of a sudden shows up in the war zone to shake your hand and have lunch with you and take a picture.
Gary Sinise:
After a while, I started to realize that the trips were indeed doing what I wanted, which were lifting spirits, and that while I don’t think I’m that special of a deal, just the fact that I showed up in a far-off war zone or something like that, on a military base where people are getting shot at daily, that is kind of special to somebody. I wanted to do more of that because I wanted to lift people up.
Trent Horn:
And you were in the midst of your acting career, and even after Forrest Gump, still trying to find your place in that and also helping the military. It seemed like a lot changed after 9/11, though, when that happened.
Gary Sinise:
Yeah. In the book, there’s a chapter called Turning Point, and it’s for a reason. It’s the September 11th chapter. I think the work that I’d done with the Vietnam veterans locally in Chicago in the ’80s, and getting involved with our wounded in the ’90s… After I played Forrest Gump, I was introduced to the organization called Disabled American Veterans. It’s got like two million wounded veterans that are a part of this organization. At that time, this is the ’90s, so they went back to World War II.
Gary Sinise:
Getting involved with them set the stage for what I would do after September 11th and the attacks on our country and the deployments to Afghanistan, the deployments to Iraq, the fact that we were losing people in combat, they were getting killed, they were getting hurt. We had more and more wounded coming into the hospitals. I just felt like there was a role for me to play not just on the movie screen or the television screen, but in life to try to bring some joy and lift some spirits. I really felt, in some ways, just called to service at that…
Gary Sinise:
I tell a story in the book about going to our little Catholic church in Malibu. We lived in Malibu, and there’s a small Catholic church where our kids were going to school. September 11th happened on a Tuesday, and George Bush wanted to make the following Friday a national day of prayer for the nation. The houses of worship were packed all across the country. The churches were just packed during this day.
Gary Sinise:
We went to our little local Catholic church, and there was no place to sit. It was so crowded, and so me and my family, and my kids were little, all of us stood on the side, just on the wall. We listened to the… There was the Mass, the homily, all this. I remember the priest saying… The first words out of his mouth to everybody when he started his homily was “This has been a tough week.” I’ll never forget that because it was a horrible week.
Gary Sinise:
Something may have happened at that point because in the homily, while I can’t remember every word or every detail, there was something I took from it, because everybody in there was trying to find some way to help their own grief about what had happened to our country and the images that everybody had from that terrible day and everything. My heart was broken, and I heard something that day about service being a great healer. Whether he said those words or not, I heard those words somehow, and I ramped up everything at that point.
Gary Sinise:
I consider September 11th to be a point where I stopped focusing solely on myself and my career and my acting to this broader service life of trying to help people. Having been involved with veterans back in the ’80s and ’90s, I knew exactly where I was going to employ my efforts, and that was going to be to help the men and women who were responding to those attacks.
Trent Horn:
How do you think that our listeners, anyone listening to this podcast, can better serve the members of our armed forces, especially those who are wounded, veterans who are trying to cope? Just the regular person listening, what are some ways that they can help to serve?
Gary Sinise:
There’s certainly a lot of national organizations. I have one, the Gary Sinise Foundation, and we have thousands of donors and thousands of people that support us and contribute to us so that we can facilitate all the programs that are a part of the foundation and everything. There’s a lot of good nonprofits out there that you can support.
Gary Sinise:
But the first thing I always say is that if everyone would take up the charge in their own neighborhoods, in their communities, in their towns, in their cities, in their states to seek out the men and women who have served our country, the families who have endured long deployments, who may be struggling, if every community in this country made it a mission to make sure that we take care of the people that defend us in whatever ways they need, then we would have…
Gary Sinise:
The problems that we hear about veterans not getting services or veterans not getting support, or having to stand in line too long, or they can’t get an appointment or whatever, if we just took some responsibility ourselves for patting them on the back and asking them what they need in our… The neighbor down the street might be a wounded veteran or something like that. I think we would reduce that problem. That’s what I’m trying to do, is just reach out and touch them personally, and try to inspire others to action to do the same thing.
Trent Horn:
Well, God bless you in that work, Gary. I’m going to be making a donation to the Gary Sinise Foundation, and I’m going to encourage our listeners to do the same because you’re doing a lot of good work to help those in the armed forces, those who are veterans. There is no excuse for us to turn a blind eye. I’m very grateful. I am a grateful-
Gary Sinise:
Thank you.
Trent Horn:
… American for your work and for many others’. I think also when we reflect on this and what you were talking about in that homily you heard, it reminds me of a quote from C.S. Lewis. He once said that God whispers to us in our pleasures, He speaks to us in our conscience, and He shouts to us in our pain; it’s His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Sometimes we hear God most clearly and loudly in pain, either the pain of a nation that’s been attacked or the pain of suffering in a crisis in one’s own life, which is a good segue into the new film that you’re starring in this week called I Still Believe, based on the life of Christian singer Jeremy Camp. While we still have some time with you, let’s talk a little about that in this movie that’s coming out now this week I recommend people to see-
Gary Sinise:
That’s a beautiful quote. My son is a big C.S. Lewis fan. I’m sure he knows that quote, and he’ll be happy to hear that one.
Trent Horn:
I’ve had the pleasure to meet your son, Mac. He’s a very solid young man. I really enjoyed my time that I got to spend with him.
Trent Horn:
So the film is I Still Believe, and this is actually the first faith-based film… I just found this out yesterday… that’s going to be shown in IMAX. It’s the first faith-based film-
Gary Sinise:
You just told me that. I didn’t know. Thank you.
Trent Horn:
It’s the first one that’s going to have an IMAX premiere. It’s the story of award-winning Christian singer Jeremy Camp and his first marriage to Melissa Lynn Henning-Camp and their struggle with her cancer diagnosis. Country singer Shania Twain plays Jeremy Camp’s mother, opposite actor Gary Sinise, who plays Jeremy Camp’s father. Britt Robertson plays Camp’s late wife, and New Zealand actor KJ Apa is playing the role of Camp. He’s an actor in the TV series Riverdale. It’s the story Jeremy Camp. A lot of our listeners probably know his music. He’s an award-winning Christian musician and-
Gary Sinise:
Huge following.
Trent Horn:
Huge follow. And I have watched the trailer for I Still Believe, and I’m telling you, it gave me goosebumps when I watched that trailer. It’s just such a powerful story about someone wrestling with their faith and illness and personal tragedy, but always turning to God in the midst of it. What attracted you to the role of Jeremy’s father in this film?
Gary Sinise:
I loved the father-son relationship. The father is very… He’s torn because Jeremy makes some decisions that he doesn’t necessarily agree with or understand at the time that Jeremy makes them, but he comes to have great admiration and respect for the decision that his son makes. It’s a beautiful, loving father-son relationship in that way.
Gary Sinise:
I thought in the simple way that that particular story in the movie is told between the father and son, and it’s… The primary story is the love story between Melissa and Jeremy. In the small and simple way that that father-son story is told, I thought it was very, very effective economically, because it’s not about the father. It’s not about my character. It really is the two young folks. But the story was a good one.
Gary Sinise:
And I know the filmmakers. I knew the two guys that made it. They made a movie last year called I Can Only Imagine, and it was a big, big hit in that market. Dennis Quaid was terrific in it. They did a terrific job with it. They asked me to come on board, and I was happy they did.
Trent Horn:
You could probably relate to some of that. I know sometimes actors, of course, borrow from their own personal lives. Your children were little when you were doing a lot of your more famous roles, the roles like Apollo 13, Forrest Gump. Now you’re transitioning to these roles where you have adult children of your own. Some have gone off to be married, and you know that feeling of… My kids are still little, of course, two and four years old. That’s way down the line for me to imagine with them. But you’re always still that secure foundation for them to turn to even when things get rough, and I think that’s something maybe you brought into the character.
Gary Sinise:
Yeah. We have two daughters and a son, and I have a very close relationship with all my kids. I found some similarities in the Jeremy role with my own son. They go through some very tough things in the film, and our family has been through some hard things, as well, so I kind of understood it.
Gary Sinise:
Their faith is tested. That story is not an unusual story. That story had been told before, but the way they do it in I Still Believe, I think, is beautiful. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s heartwarming, as well, because the love that these two have for each other, and the way they express it and share it with each other, it’s unlike… Today, we have a lot of pop culture craziness with young folks and the way they’re portrayed in the movies. There’s something very pure about how these two go about building their relationship.
Gary Sinise:
And it’s based on a true story. I thought, “Wow, this is something that we just don’t see very often.” I think people will be very touched by it, very moved by it. The two young folks, Britt and KJ, are just so good together.
Trent Horn:
Well, I’m excited to be able to see the film. What is, especially the people listening who, they might… just to tie everything together we’ve been talking about. I know there are people listening who may be going through rough things. They might have a husband who’s been deployed. They might have a family member who’s been diagnosed with an illness, like what Jeremy Camp deals with in the film.
Trent Horn:
I think there’s a theme in a lot of the work you have done and continue to do of “How do I bear the weight sometimes that life places on my shoulders?” What have you found in your own faith life, your own personal journey? And maybe not a comprehensive answer, but at least things to think about for how to bear that weight sometimes when life puts it on your shoulders, and it can feel like too much sometimes.
Gary Sinise:
The character I play in the movie says to his son at one point, “My life is not full in spite of the disappointments that I’ve had; it’s full because of them.” I think the adversities that we face sometimes, and the challenges that we face, and the overcoming of some of those challenges, just makes us stronger, and life becomes a little bit clearer. Once we’ve been through enough of that, we know we can pretty much handle just about anything with our faith and keep our faith strong.
Gary Sinise:
We’ve certainly been through a lot in our own family, and I write about some of those personal things in my book. We decided to share some very challenging times that our family had gone through. Chapter Nine in the book is called Darkness and Light, and the whole first part of the chapter is very dark, and you don’t… At times, I didn’t know how we were going to emerge into the light, but we did. And it was perseverance. It was love. It was faith. It was a lot of different things that helped us through. I think that’s one of the reasons I like this particular story of I Still Believe. Through it all, and through everything that happens through them, all the difficult things, in the end, he still believes and moves forward.
Trent Horn:
Well, amen to that. Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me,” and so always to keep at the forefront of our minds.
Trent Horn:
Reminder to our listeners, definitely consider checking out Gary’s book, Grateful American. I highly recommend that. Also, the new movie that he’s starring in, I Still Believe, you can catch it in theaters. You can even catch it in IMAX, to see a Christian film larger than life in IMAX. You can see I Still Believe. Definitely recommend that you check that out this weekend.
Gary Sinise:
If you’re interested in learning more about what we’re doing at the Gary Sinise Foundation, please go to garysinisefoundation.org. Look at the YouTube channel and the program pages to see all the wonderful things we’re doing all across the country in many different spaces. We’re helping a lot of people, and we can use your support.
Trent Horn:
Definitely. I hope you will consider supporting the Gary Sinise Foundation. Go to garysinisefoundation.org. Watch some of those videos. Bring a box of tissues with you as you do, but they’re wonderful to see.
Trent Horn:
Thank you, everyone, for tuning into this episode. If you want to help us continue to do more episodes like this, to be on YouTube, to invite great guests like Gary to come and stop by, consider supporting the work we do at trenthornpodcast.com. For as little as $5 a month, you get access to bonus content, and you help us be a light to people who may be in darkness and may be struggling right now.
Trent Horn:
Gary, thanks so much for stopping by.
Gary Sinise:
Thank you, Trent.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely. Thank you, everyone.
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