Jonathan Bellamy spoke to Australian Americans Joel and Luke Smallbone of FOR KING + COUNTRY

Luke and Joel Smallbone

As any Cross Rhythms listener will know, For King + Country have risen and risen in these storm- filled times to become, along with Lauren Daigle and TobyMac, the most popular artists in the whole Christian music world. And now the Smallbone brothers - Joel and Luke - have another string to their bow, the biographic feature film Unsung Hero which chronicles the life of David and Helen small burn and how they and their six children relocated from Sydney, Australia to Nashville, Tennessee following the collapse of David's music business after a A$500,000 loss from one concert booking. Settling into then new home, Helen's unwavering faith led to David seeking to land a Christian record label for his daughter - to be renamed Rebecca St James - after her vocal talents were recognised by friends. When CCM success arrived for Rebecca, her brothers Joel and Luke were drafted in as live concert roadies/accompanists and For King & Country began their rise to Christian music big time.

The film starred Daisy Betts as Helen Smallbone and Joel Smallbone playing his father David. Other key roles featured replaced by Kirrilee Berger as sister and singer Rebecca St James, Jonathan Jackson as record producer and label owner Eddie DeGarmo and even a small part for Rebecca St James as a flight attendant.

What could have been a recording star indulgence, Unsung Hero has proven to be both a creative and commercial success. Audiences polled by Cinema Scene gave the film an average grade of "A+" on a A+ to F scale, while those polled by PostTrack gave it a 96% overall positive score with 90% saying they would definitely recommended it.

Commercially, the film's budget was US$6 million and save file has grossed $21.1 million. The film was written by Joel Smallbone and Richard Ramsey and Joel made his film directional debut on Unsung Hero.

I began my interview by asking Joel what it was like playing his father.

Joel Smallbone: Luke and I are musicians by trade. It's one thing for folks to listen to a three-and-a-half-minute song, but it's another thing for you to sit down for an hour and 45 minutes to see and hear our family's story. Luke co-produced it, and it's been Luke's brainchild since 2020. And then for whatever reason, I can't tell you why, I thought it would be really novel if I played dad in the film. We obviously were bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, we know him so well. I don't think I really kind of counted the cost in some ways with what it would actually mean. I've dubbed it a very expensive therapy session, but I will say an awfully worthy one. Our parents are still with us, my empathy for him and for them and for what they walked through just skyrocketed. I ended up co-writing it. Luke and I were very young when we moved from Australia. Just inverting the experience from a childlike experience to the stress and the strain and the fear and the pride and the compounding failure of what dad was walking through.

Jonathan Bellamy: Your parents went through such loss and a total change in life relocating to the USA and at the same time, had to care for and cover six children. The movie shares that really well in terms of how you portray what your mother and your father stood in.

Luke Smallbone: I think what mom and dad really proved to us is that struggle is guaranteed in this world. And what are you going to do with it? I think that's the thing that when we look back, years and years, you start to see someone with a hope and a dream. And we all have hopes and we all have dreams. But sometimes you don't really hear about the struggle because when the hopes and the dreams fail, you don't talk about it anymore. You move on to something, a new dream, a new hope, in hopes that it's successful. And you can tell that story. I think it's fascinating to see how many people [have been impacted by the movie]. I was at church yesterday and all these people came up to me saying, "Hey, just want you to know, I saw the movie and the truth is, I feel much like your parents. maybe in different circumstances." And they literally start telling you their story.

Jon: Let me ask you a little bit more about your dad because you're all on a journey of faith, in the adventure of faith, but he kind of has to mine the depths in going to that journey where everybody else is kind of.

Joel: That's a good way to put it.

Jon: Marvelling seeing God at work through this. He's having to face who he is somewhere in this. And there's a real humbling for him there. It's his journey - I understand that. But what do you feel comfortable to share, because he goes from a comfortable, wealthy kind of life, I suppose, in Australia, to nothing and ends up cleaning the toilets and cutting the grass of Eddie DeGarmo, the music industry executive who he didn't want to work with back in Australia. It's an amazing thing that God would bring him to his doorstep in his own journey of being humbled. Why? Why was God humbling him so much? What was God doing with him?

Joel: Helen had her dream and that was to have a great big family. And because she had her dream she had the strength to be able to hoist David up, I think, both in real life and obviously in the film, to continue to literally go to the ends of the earth for his dream, his purpose, if you will. I think there's great strength in her and for him. I mean, we're the beneficiaries of his story now, but obviously the story's not finished, we can't holistically say what all the whys were. But I can tell you a couple of things, one, without my father walking through all that, we're not in this, we're not in America anymore, I don't know if we'd be working together or banded together as a family in the same way. Without him having to deal with his pride, I don't think there is any Rebecca St James, our sister, or For King + Country, the band that Luke and I are a part of. You can see the breadcrumbs and the sort of footsteps of God's goodness in his radically dealing with him, by the compounding failure of circumstances, dealing with his own inner struggle. And seeing how the community really rallied. I think the other thing that it's forced Luke and I into is this idea of like, we're stronger together than we are on our own.

Jon: You kind of show that he got to a point where it broke him. But almost that seemed to be the turning point. Was that what happened in life? Was that the moment that things began to change, when your dad kind of got to the end of himself?

Luke: Well, definitely. When you have that amount of failure, you do start to ask yourself, is it going to end? And I do think when that record label deal fell through, that was dad's moment. I think that sometimes in God's mercy, he allows us to go to incredible depths of pain. And I think that was the bottom of the barrel for dad. I think that was the moment where, he would say that it was one day that it was difficult for him to get out of bed. But the joy of when you hit the bottom of the barrel is there's only one way to go and that's up. I think that dad started to see that they were, you know, we were all here for a point, for a purpose.

And though he didn't know what the outcome was going to be - we were still raking leaves and mowing lawns and cleaning houses - we were making a way forward. I think dad had recognized that, "yeah, this isn't going according to plan, but we still have a way forward here. There is still purpose behind it." Dad is an incredibly optimistic person and I think that that was evident after those moments of great, great struggle.

Jon: Let me ask about the other side of the journey then, because particularly for your mum and for your siblings, you really did connect on that adventure of faith, didn't you?

Joel: Well, it was certainly a childlike type of faith, right? We were so young, Luke and me. Part of the reason we took a lot of pride in telling this story was because yes, it's our family story, yes, it's our kind of origin story, but it's so much more than a story about mums and about dads. It's like you said, it's a story about, you know, Rebecca, young ladies trying to find what they're designed to do and who they're called to be. And so it's an adventure film, it's a drama film, and there's so much about what happened in front of the camera. It's interesting how this works, Jonathan, that it was really depicted in so many ways behind the camera too, this idea of family. Luke had his four kids on set a lot, and you saw a bunch of really great actors show up, John Locke from Lost or DJ Tanner from Full House or Lucas Black from Fast And Furious and NCYS, and all of whom really value these kind of ideas and ideals and family. And so it was like, you had this adventure going on in front of the screen, but you had this adventure, this sort of ceaseless adventure going on behind the screen, even down to Lionsgate coming on and distributing it here in the United States, even us having this conversation. So it's been quite the adventure. Not only did we live the adventures as kids, but it's been this whole other like re-imaging of the adventure to bring this film to life and drop back into those sort of. not quite our shoes, but the multiverse of like me being dad and this being mum, but that's not mum and you have to kiss mum, but that's me, but I'm me. All of those layers are very - they're sort of bizarre and magical in a sense.

Jon: Luke, let me ask you in terms of your journey of faith, what's the one thing you most remember growing up in those times that impacted you?

Luke: My mum used to have this statement. part of the reason why it has resonated with me for so many years is because I saw her live it. I remember going to play, I grew up playing sports, a lot of sports and obviously there was those moments where you had the baseball game and it would rain right before the baseball game, but obviously you're, you know, cricket or whatever it is and you're mad, you're like frustrated or the best friends coming over and he gets sick or you get sick or whatever it is and there's this great disappointment. Mum used to say , "Luke, are you disappointed?" I'd say yeah, I am disappointed. She would say it's good to learn how to overcome disappointment, and when I look back on their life, if you learn how to overcome disappointment, you're literally playing with house money everywhere you go because you're still going to have that relentless positivity, you're still going to have that relentless hope.

That doesn't mean you still don't have those moments of great strife and struggle, but if you have the mechanism to figure out how to work through it, man, what a powerful life you can live. I think that mum and dad tried their best to teach us those things. And man, at the end of the day, probably the reason we told this story is because we're forever changed by their example. Not a perfect example - our family's not a perfect family. I mean, you watch the movie, it gets a little messy at times! But some of the lessons learned through it, man, what a gift, and even for mum and dad. I don't think you ever desire to go through struggle again because it's just not innately who we are as humans, but the lessons that were taught and the lessons that were learned were invaluable. I think that we would say if we knew that this was the outcome, we'd go through it again because the lessons were just that valuable and powerful.