And if you watch Jerry play, he’ll flick his hands. How do your fingers bleed while playing piano?Ĭhristian: Bad technique, I guess? It’s not a great thing to happen, but I guess it kind of shows the passion I have for this project. Funny story: During the audition, I made my fingers bleed. But I had to learn to play like Jerry, which was from hours of watching YouTube. I studied Jerry’s idols, like Fats Domino, Little Richard and many more.ĭid you have to learn piano for the series?Ĭhristian: I’ve been playing piano since I was 14 and writing music. I can definitely see that contributing to the baggage, or whatever you want to call it, that he was carrying throughout his life.Ĭhristian: Since I grew up on this music, it was a perfect fit.
Even though there’s no specific scene, there are little moments of jealousy - and the way women treat him and the rivalry with Jerry - and Jimmy coming up short. His scandal and the choices he made must come from prior moments in his life. It was always in the back of my mind in every scene. Did you ever try to figure out what may have happened in his childhood that maybe contributed to that? Did you apply that to this character? And as such an amazing and powerful person that Jimmy Swaggart was it’s interesting to imagine him in his youth and what inspired him. That’s what attracted me to being an actor in the first place - just these kind of processes. And then you can kind of chip away to imagine what they were like at a young age, because there’s no footage of those guys just knocking about. And so I kind of started there and did an impression of him at that age. You have to watch them perform and get whatever you can and learn their mannerisms and vowels and timing. Jonah: The majority of the footage I’ve found is of him preaching and no younger than a middle-aged man, so it’s an interesting process.
How did you initially prepare for the roles of Jerry and Jimmy?
JIMMY SWAGGART MUSIC TV
And now, we have to fall asleep listening to the TV because we were always falling asleep as babies with noise all around us backstage. That definitely impacted us, being around all that music. In fact, our parents were in a band, and so we grew up around music, going on tour, traveling around the world on cruise ships before we could speak. We’d perform Elvis’ “Suspicious Minds” and “Hound Dog.” It was kind of the start of us becoming entertainers. So we’d dress up in those white sequined jumpsuits and gold sunglasses and sing. We actually put Elvis costumes on our Christmas list. Jonah: What happened was, once we learned to speak, we would try to make our mum and dad laugh by performing for them.Įlvis was actually someone that Christian and I absolutely loved when we were about 4 or 5 years old. And, you’d never guess it from their performative Southern accents, but these brothers hail from the U.K.ĬMT.com: At what point did you guys catch the acting bug? Jonah plays Jerry’s cousin and (in)famous televangelist, Jimmy Swaggart. Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart may be cousins, but they’re actually played by twins Christian and Jonah Lees on Sun Records.Ĭhristian, plays a young Jerry Lee Lewis.
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