The Hottest Character In Hollywood Is... God

God is everywhere these days. She’s helping Eric navigate his sexuality and faith on Netflix’s Sex Education. He’s endorsing a marriage between identical twins in A24’s Dicks!: The Musical. And soon, He’ll task a mortal with a special mission in Not Another Church Movie, which has a trailer that promises “comedy of Biblical proportions” but no firm release date.

God’s always been pretty popular in certain circles; He is, after all, the Good Book’s Main Character. (I am defaulting to He/Him pronouns here, because I firmly believe anyone who’d punish a woman for seeking knowledge is a dude.) But as of late, He’s all the rage in Hollywood, too, appearing in the three aforementioned projects just this year (in the guise of Jodie Turner-Smith, Bowen Yang, and Jamie Foxx, respectively). In the past couple of years, He’s also appeared as Steve Buscemi in Miracle Workers, Dennis Haysbert in Lucifer, and (the voice of) Frances McDormand in Good Omens.

Of course, if God were to present Himself to us mortals in His actual form, our tiny little brains would almost certainly explode. At the very least, we’d have to view Him through protective glasses; taking in the unadulterated Alpha and Omega would certainly be discouraged by public health professionals. But these new guises are particularly unexpected, as if He’s launching a something-for-everyone rebrand: Sometimes young! Sometimes diverse! Sometimes Steve Buscemi!

His message has changed a lot, too. In lieu of millennia-old edicts, God’s onscreen personages take a decidedly looser approach to the old “Thou Shalt Nots” — or flip the script(ure) altogether. Take God-as-Bowen-Yang, donning a robe embellished with scenes of gay men going at it, who explains that all love is love (yes, even incest), and leads His congregation in a rousing rendition of the instant Christian classic “God Is a F*ggot.” (Look out for that in your revised 2024 hymnal.) In Sex Education, too, God arrives to champion LGBTQ+ acceptance — though this time, God-as-Jodie-Turner-Smith delivers a solemn, non-musical speech.

It makes sense that God would want to reach the youth where they are, His interest in film and television akin to a multinational conglomerate’s use of social media. But why is Hollywood interested in Him?

Perhaps, given the recent wars and the actually-not-over pandemic and the political strife and the climate changing and the general apocalyptic bent of the 2020s thus far, writers and filmmakers are interested in taking the Man Upstairs to task.

If Succession taught us anything, it’s that we all desperately want a kiss from daddy, and no daddy is more daddy than the ur-daddy, God.

Or maybe it’s related to our nation’s perennial daddy issues (see: the “Founding Fathers”). If Succession taught us anything, it’s that we all desperately want a kiss from daddy, and no daddy is more daddy than the ur-daddy, God.

Regardless, it’s nice to see the old man with a spring in his step. While I have some serious, potential deal-breaker questions I’d like to take up with Heritage Brand God, Jodie Turner-Smith’s is one I can get behind.