Sunday, UP premieres Noah’s Ark, a spellbinding movie about one of the Bible’s most epic stories of one man’s faith and his unrelenting belief in a message from God. Noah, a farmer and family man, is instructed by an angel to build an ark in the middle of a desert in order to save both his family and the faithful from a devastating flood. Noah’s seemingly impossible quest tests his faith in God and everything he believes in. This obsession also leads to the fragmentation of his family, as their faith in their father is questioned.
Noah is powerfully portrayed by David Threlfall (Tommy Cooper, Shameless, What Remains). And from the moment he read the script, the actor felt the role within his soul. “The story jumped off the page at me from the first reading. It’s not just a family saga, but the first family saga,” he says. “It takes its inspiration from many faiths and speaks of values which should be shared across all cultures. It was something I immediately wanted to be part of.”
The production filmed in recent-filming hotspot, Morocco and features an almost exclusively British cast. Joanne Whalley (The Borgias, Jamaica Inn) beautifully plays Noah’s his steadfast wife Emmie and Nico Mirallegro (The Village) is Kenan, one of Noah’s sons.
The special, co-produced with the BBC, also co-stars Ashley Walters (Top Boy, Truckers), Emily Bevan (In The Flesh), Hannah John-Kamen (The Hour, Death In Paradise), Georgina Campbell (One Night), Ian Smith (The Syndicate), Michael Fox (New Worlds) and Andrew Hawley (Hinterland, Borgia).
I will admit that at first, I was taken aback to hear the actors speak with British accents, but after a few minutes that surprise melted away. The film is wonderfully produced and in this season of many biblically-themed specials on TV (The Dovekeepers, A.D., Killing Jesus), Noah’s Ark is a good addition to any family’s faith-based watching. And instead of relying on special effects like a recent cinematic blockbuster that dealt with the same subject matter, Noah’s Ark focuses on the central message of the story. I particularly enjoyed an exchange with his young son (or perhaps foster son) Kenan where Noah counsels his son about the existence of God.
“You can say, ‘I don’t know,’ at least that’s honest — not anyone has faith. But only an idiot will say, ‘there is no God,’ because to say that, you must first surely understand everything, and only an idiot would think that he did.”
Noah’s Ark > UP TV > Sunday, March 22 at 7pm ET/ 6pm PT