Long before Kirk Cameron played Captain Caleb Holt in Fireproof. Before Karen Abercrombie encouraged people to find happiness through prayer as Miss Clara in War Room. And even before Grant Taylor, played by Alex Kendrick, prepares to lose his job as a high school football coach in Facing the Giants, the Kendrick Brothers were teaching Chick-fil-A workers how to be excellent at their jobs.
The Kendrick Brothers’ Chick-fil-A Roots
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Alex and Stephen Kendrick spent a few years working at the Cumberland Mall Chickfila in Cumberland, Georgia. And when the corporate office decided to pay a visit to shoot some training videos, the brothers both landed parts in the films. Alex Kendrick starred in a video about how to clean a Chick-fil-A grill. Stephen Kendrick played “Lemar” in a video called Talking Trash, a training video on how to clean up tables. “It’s a VHS tape stuck in the bowels of the Chick-fil-A archives somewhere,” joked Stephen Kendrick on a recent episode of My Pleasure: the Unofficial Chick-fil-A Podcast. “It was good preparation for what was to come.”
The Kendrick Brothers Turn to Filmmaking
What was to come was a career in ministry at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. God used an idea to create a video to share the Gospel to create a series of major motion pictures written and produced by the brothers over nearly two decades. The Kendrick Brothers began their journey in 2003 with the production of the micro-budget film, FLYWHEEL, which has now sold over a million DVDs. They followed that with a list of theatrical releases including: FACING THE GIANTS, FIREPROOF (#1 Independent Movie of 2008), WAR ROOM (#1 at the US box office) and OVERCOMER (#1 Inspirational movie of 2019).
The Kendrick Brothers’ First Documentary
Stephen Kendrick also talked about the emotional experience of sharing his adoption story in the brothers’ first-ever documentary SHOW ME THE FATHER debuting on DVD and Digital December 7, from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and AFFIRM Films. Also coming on December 7, COURAGEOUS LEGACY, a remastered, extended version of the Kendrick Brothers’ classic film that has been impacting fathers and families around the world since its initial release 10 years ago.
Enjoy our interview with Stephen Kendrick:
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