Audiences get an earful and little else from preachy ‘Left Behind’

“Left Behind” hits theaters today, merging biblical prophecy and pop culture, as the feature film aims to attract a wider and more diverse audience than its previous inceptions. Among members of the cast — which includes actors Nicolas Cage, who plays pilot Rayford Steele and Chad Michael Murray, who portrays journalist Buck Williams — is Alec Rayme, an actor and stunt devil originally from Akron, Ohio, who has a pivotal role in the end times movie. Rayme, 35, plays Hassid, a kind and compassionate Muslim character who joins his fellow protagonists in coping with the chaos that follows the rapture, a theological phenomenon in which Christians are taken up to heaven by Jesus before the Earth’s final destruction. The actor, who is a practicing Christian, told TheBlaze in an interview that he connected with his “Left Behind” role on a deeper level than he has for many of his past acting gigs, citing his personal experience and familiarity with the Islamic faith as the primary reason. “This role I connected with because [of] my background,” he said. “My father being Muslim, my whole entire family overseas being Muslim. ” Hassid is presented as a man who is moral and helpful — a “good guy,” Rayme said, which made the role even more appealing to him. The actor, who was born Ali Alherimi but who uses Rayme as his stage name, said that he was never a practicing Muslim, but that his father, an Arab born in Jerusalem, is an adherent of the Islamic faith. “My dad actually got brought over from the Middle East by a Methodist pastor when he was 18,” Rayme explained. “[My dad] met him when he was 9 and he was actually getting beat by an Israeli soldier and this pastor was over there visiting and screamed at the soldier, ‘That’s my son! That’s my son!’ just to protect him.”

That pastor told Rayme’s father that if he did well in school he would come back to see him. And, after numerous visits, the Methodist preacher eventually brought his dad at age 18 to the United States, where he went to college on scholarship. Rayme’s mother, who is a Christian of European descent, later married his father, bringing their children up in a mixed religious home. Despite being raised with faith all around him, Rayme said that for most of his life he only nominally considered himself a Christian. While he believed in God, he was theologically unsure of the finer details and hadn’t quite committed — an uncertainty that continued through his college years. “I liked playing football in college and I liked going out every night drinking,” he said. “But it then got to a point where all that started to really take a toll physically and mentally.” Rayme said he didn’t truly dive into the Christian faith, though, until five years ago when a friend called him out of concern.

“I had a friend call me that I hadn’t talked to in years and he was like, ‘I’ve just been thinking about you. You’ve been on my mind because I’m worried about you, you know? Where are you in your life now?,’” he explained. “I was like, ‘Man that’s crazy. You just called me. I’m literally like screaming out to God. I don’t know what else to do I’m in the lowest I’ve ever been. Blackest, darkest, most despair feeling.’” At the time, Rayme said he had been out partying every night — a lifestyle that he knew wasn’t right. He said that while he believed the Bible was true, he had procrastinated in embracing his faith until he finally came to a breaking point one night while drinking wine and getting high on marijuana. It was that moment that something profoundly changed.