BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When he was 15 years old, actor Brandon Micheal Hall was warned performing was not for him. “I had a teacher who told me that acting was not going to be financially stable and I shouldn’t do it. That was so much fuel,” he says.
“I’ll never forget being in class and me saying, like, ‘Thank you.’ That was my confirmation that I NEED to go do this.” One year later he left home to attend the South Carolina Governor’s School for Arts and Humanities.
His mother (who’d singly raised him) and his sister encouraged him to attend the boarding school. “My mom has always been supportive,” says Hall. ” ‘If that’s what you want to do, you need to go in 200 percent.’ ”
It’s clear Hall has always done things 200 percent. When he was little he used to regale customers at Walmart elaborate stories about how he met Mickey Mouse at Disney World, though he’d never been to Disney World. “I saw him on TV,” he grins, “I was a storyteller.”
He still is. And Hall is performing a unique story in CBS’ new comedy “God Friended Me,” about an atheist whose life is upended when he receives the ultimate friend request on social media from — you guessed it — God. How faith intercedes in our lives is not only the subject of the show, but a pivotal part of Hall’s life.
“I grew up in the church, reading the Bible, going to church three times a day — Southern Baptist — you were IN the church,” says Hall.
“You gotta take your homework with you. I think that’s the reason why I took on the show because I finally get an opportunity to gain my own relationship with God through this experience, because I’m going completely away, taking on the role of an atheist to find his way back to what God means to him,” he says.
“My grandmother used to say this old Southern quote: ‘You can only ride on grandmother’s prayers for so long.’ God rest her soul, she’s not with us anymore,” he sighs. “So this came at a perfect time when I was in a place where I needed to see God for my own self.”
Hall, 25, says he always exhibited a questioning mind about religion, even as a kid. “Then I got to a certain point where I said, ‘OK, I’ll just take it at face value.’ But then I remember praying about two months ago, and I was saying the prayer like we always say them, I was like, ‘I have no idea who I’m talking to and why I’m saying this. I just know it makes me feel good, which is great. But what is my own personal relationship?’ ”
Today he says he’s not defined by any particular religion. “Spirituality-wise I find that meditation is working really well for me, and also when I pray and am having conversations with someone, no matter who that person may be in that moment, now I have a conversation with some ‘one’ who I definitely can see, and I’m ready to hear what they have to say to me. Before it was just like, ‘Let’s go through the routine.’ But now it’s like, ‘I’m ready. What’s up? Let’s talk about some things.'”
With his mom as inspiration, Hall developed self-reliance early. “Growing up without a dad that showed me independence and showed me respect for single strong women,” he says. “Mom taught me the essence of work.”
And work he did. At 14 he landed his first job at Chick-fil-A. The following year he toiled at both Chick-fil-A and counseled at the YMCA.
“We grew up wealthy, we didn’t grow up rich,” he says. “The difference is that the rich you can see it, the wealthy is more of an internal. I was wealthy in my mind, spirit and soul. My mom always kept the lights on. We always had a roof over our head. Now sometimes we didn’t have a lot in the refrigerator, sometimes there was nothing but peanut butter, some rice and wienies to throw together.”
He landed his first acting job while he was still in school. “It was a pilot for CBS called ‘LFE,’ a medical drama using only millennials. “I was 21 and was working at Teavana, a tea shop, as a barista and was a bike courier delivering food on the Upper East Side. I was so fit, great abs,” he laughs.
Parts in “Search Party” and the starring role in “The Mayor” followed. “The thing that scares me — and it won’t happen because I have too many people in my life that are keeping me on the straight and narrow and center. … What scares me is to get too commercial and you start losing the sense of the message behind what you’re doing,” he says.
