Emmy Award-winning actor, filmmaker and activist Yuval David and his husband Mark McDermott, who is a corporate attorney and co-founder of the charity organisation Catholic Renewal, are enormously inspiring individuals. Recently, the married couple decided to combine their talents to write, direct and produce their very first film titled Wonderfully Made.

The idea came about after Mark began searching for inclusive imagery of Jesus, depictions of Jesus as LGBTQ+ or as a supporter of the community but found very little. After coming to this realisation, Yuval and Mark decided to create unique religious art to represent all LGBTQ+ people and that’s how Wonderfully Made was born.

The synopsis for their film reads: “Jesus has almost always been depicted in paintings, sculptures and film as a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, cisgender male. But such depictions exclude, contrary to everything Jesus taught. And this exclusion has enabled centuries of discrimination, oppression and injustice against women, people of colour, and anyone else who has found themselves on the margins of society, including LGBTQ+ people.”

GCN was lucky enough to sit down with Yuval and Mark to have an incredibly insightful conversation about their work, pride and Wonderfully Made.

Yuval, are you still acting alongside being an activist?

Yes, I am. The balance is sometimes challenging, and there are times that I worry if doing so much activism impacts my work in entertainment and media, but I just have to do what my heart tells me to do. I have a television show that I’m not yet allowed to say much about, but it comes out at the end of this year.

I’m always open and available for opportunities and looking for them and that’s part of the life of being an actor, trying to make sure that you’re ready for whatever opportunity comes your way. That was something that led me to create a lot of my own content. I wasn’t comfortable with waiting. I don’t think that in life, anybody should wait for an opportunity to come their way. They should just seize it, create it themselves, or collaborate with people who are doing the things that they love.

Mark, can you tell us about your work with Catholic Renewal?

I’m a corporate attorney that specialises in restructurings companies that need help carrying out their affairs. Everybody knows each other and knows of each other in my industry and it’s a very generous one. We have a lot of big fundraisers every year. 12 or 13 years ago, a small group of seven of us decided to create a little charity with a faith dimension to it that would be targeted towards our community, lawyers and investment bankers who do what we do.

Yuval, with all of the inhumane anti-LGBTQ+ bills and legislation that have been introduced in the US over the last few months, what actions do you think need to be made by LGBTQ+ people to help contribute to reversing these changes?

We’re in a state of emergency and I think it’s very important for people to recognise that the high amount of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that is happening is a reflection of the anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments that exist within our society. In this year alone, there were over 520 bills that have been proposed across the United States designed to curb the rights of LGBTQ people and it’s unacceptable. Especially when we look at what America stands for supposed democracy, freedom, equality, and justice.

This a time where we must take action and we must advocate for our LGBTQ+ causes and share our stories because we are not normalised yet. We are still seen as different or as a marginalised community. Why do we have Pride marches? Oftentimes I remind people that it’s a march, it’s not a parade. I say these things because every day, when I open up my social media, I have extremely hateful comments on a daily basis.

Lately, I have this group that’s putting swastikas on as comments to all of my videos and posts across Tiktok, Instagram, and Facebook and it’s troubling. When we encounter hate, whether it’s in society, people’s beliefs or business’ beliefs and when it’s happening with our political leaders, we need to be advocates, and we need to speak out much more.

Does Pride have a different meaning for you both?

Mark: I think it’s more defensive. It’s still a celebration but, given the change in the climate over here, and around the world, it just feels more like this is not just a celebration anymore. Not all of it ever was, not that there’s anything wrong with celebration but, it’s taken on a little bit more of a grimness about it because we’re backsliding.

Yuval: Has Pride shifted for me? No. I think more has come to light. We have many achievements that we have to celebrate and we should celebrate them. We also just need to be aware that more lights are on. That has also happened with the era of social media that we’re in and how technology has advanced communication. Not only has it spread our messages, giving them further reach, but it’s also spread the messages against us. So many people speak about hate speech and the problems with hate speech and how social media platforms allow hate speech. We have to recognise that the best response to hate speech is more speech. If we’re seeing the hate, we need to share more love.

Your new film, Wonderfully Made has just come out, how did the idea come about to write and direct this powerful project?

Yuval: Wonderfully Made came about after Mark was searching online for Catholic iconography that spoke to him, that represented him as a gay Catholic person. He was searching and searching and this was going on for months and he kept trying to find some sort of image, some sort of art that would speak to him. Finally, I said: “You married a creative, let’s just create it ourselves, create something that’s for you, and for anybody who is like you because if you are searching for this, and you have the benefits and the luxuries of being able to be every part of your identity with this great level of comfort, there are many other people out there who don’t have that level of comfort.” That’s how this project started.

It started as an art project, reimagining Jesus as a member or ally of the LGBTQ community, and how to create that. Not just for Mark, but for anybody who, like Mark, was also searching for something that is still traditional enough to connect to what people are used to, but also completely different enough to represent more people who need representation. As a Jewish person who’s not Catholic and not Christian, I entered it from a place of advocacy and storytelling, helping people share the stories that they need to tell, and that they need to share and helping people find what they need to find.

Mark: You talked earlier about what we can do when we’re facing these attacks. One of the things I came to appreciate is that sometimes trying to reason with somebody doesn’t get you anywhere. In fact, I learned a while ago the power of a good story can actually make a point better than trying to make some sort of reasoned argument about it. We’ve been depicting Jesus for 1700 years, always the same way as a white guy who’s blonde-haired, blue-eyed and he’s cisgender and yet we talk about God as in all of us. Well, if I show somebody an image, an image is hard to forget. We could talk about the six blockbuster provisions of Leviticus, but take a look at an image and you’ll still remember it.

Yuval: That’s what Wonderfully Made is about. This documentary film is art for social change, art as advocacy. How to create something that people can see that represents them or that just makes them think about something that maybe challenges them. Art isn’t only supposed to be wonderful, comfortable, and sweet and make you feel good. Sometimes art is supposed to and can disturb and disrupt. As we’ve also discovered with this project, offend. There are a lot of people who are offended by this project.

Sadly, most of them haven’t even given it a chance. They are just offended by the concept of an LGBTQ+ Jesus? What a travesty. A woman Jesus? A lesbian Jesus? A trans-Jesus? Oh, my gosh! Don’t even get me started… But most of them didn’t even read a full article about it. They didn’t even look at the website or the social media. They’re just immediately offended.

Again, we cannot only pay attention to the haters. We need to pay attention to the lovers, and we need the help of our community to help amplify this story of Wonderfully Made and this entire project because it is a grassroots project, it’s an independent production, it’s not a big studio production. We did it ourselves because we just couldn’t wait for somebody else to help us tell this story. We started telling the story, then the pandemic happened and we were struggling to continue how to do this during a pandemic and we did it, we completed it, and now we just want to share it with the world.