The Latter-day Saint Who is the Executive Producer of “The Chosen”

Brad Pelo, the Executive Producer and President of 5&2 Studios, creators of The Chosen, might just hold one of the most unique claims among filmmakers today: sharing Easter dinner with Jesus and Peter this year, and Jesus and Judas the year before. “We hoped to get them reconciled,” he quipped.

As Season 5 of the acclaimed film series, depicting the life of Jesus and his apostles, is now streaming on Amazon Prime, its influence continues to expand, captivating 320 million viewers worldwide and setting new milestones in global viewership.

The show garners not just viewers, but passionate followers, who are brought closer to scripture through adding this visual and imaginative dimension.

Heading the studio team is a Latter-day Saint, which might come as a surprise given that Dallas Jenkins, the creator and director of this series, is an evangelical Christian. Historically, Evangelicals have sometimes been cautious or reserved toward Latter-day Saints, but this dynamic seems to dissolve in the context of The Chosen.

With this duo, Dallas creates and Brad greases the wheels so everything runs smoothly. In film, it takes both kinds of talent at the peak of their performance to bring this kind of success to a project.

How Brad and Dallas came to work together is an intriguing orchestration. Brad became a fan of The Chosen during Season 1. Then, during COVID, his wife, Melody, saw on social media that The Chosen was looking for a place to film Season 2. Brad had been working as president of Radiant, a Bonneville Communications Company, so he reached out to his contacts at the Church and asked if he could host Dallas Jenkins to see the large Jerusalem set at Goshen, built for the Latter-day Saint productions of biblical films.  

Brad said, “Dallas and I met for the first time when I picked him up, and we drove out to Goshen, and he saw that set, and it was love at first sight for him. Driving away from the set, he said, ‘Mr. Pelo, if you could do anything to help me obtain use of this set, I’d be most grateful.’” The senior leadership of the Church gave approval, and production plans began.

“At that point, I wasn’t looking to stay involved with The Chosen, but Dallas kept calling me with requests, whether it was advice or a little homework assignment, and in due course, after several months of that, he asked me if I would be willing to get more involved,” Brad said.

This required Brad to step into the role of chief distribution officer at Angel Studios, which was responsible for producing the show at that time. Brad rolled up his sleeves and did what it took, becoming deeply involved in every aspect of the production, from marketing and creating The Chosen app to organizing fan engagement and crowdfunding efforts, including coordinating the 2,500 extras who participated in the filming of the Sermon on the Mount. Brad also negotiated contracts with broadcast networks and streaming platforms worldwide, ensuring the project could expand its reach and impact. “We did everything possible to push the project forward,” he shared. 

“A year later, Dallas asked me to be the president and executive producer of The Chosen, he said. It was a path Brad had been well prepared for, as he had been a member of the founding team for several tech companies before becoming a producer of films, Forever Strong and Utah’s own Stadium of Fire. Yet, more than executive ability connected Brad and Dallas.

“I would describe our connection as a brotherhood,” Brad said. “I think we both felt called to do this work in our respective capacities. I don’t contribute in any way to the scripts or the creative storytelling, but because we’re an independent production and studio, there are 90 employees and lots of relationships that have to be managed, and many decisions to be made. If I can do all those things, which is what I’ve been doing for years now, then it frees him up to continue to do what he does best. We’re each in our lanes, and I think they’re very complementary. We love working together.”

The Risk of Imagining the Backstory of an Iconic Character

When viewers begin to watch The Chosen, they are sometimes taken aback in the first couple of episodes. Here are the apostles as they’ve never seen them before, with backstories that have spun from the writer’s imagination. Peter is not as you have imagined him. Matthew is autistic. The Galilean fishermen who followed Jesus are flawed, sometimes irritated, and often overwhelmed.

Brad said, “The beautiful thing about the way Dallas tells this story is that he starts with the biblical text and then considers what is plausible in the make-up of the characters while remaining biblically aligned.”

Creating characters of such iconic people can be risky, especially when the audience has already imagined for themselves what each character is probably like.

“For me, I can honestly say that there have been multiple times where I’ve seen the physical characteristics of someone and thought that doesn’t seem to be what I would imagine. When I met both Judas and Pilate on screen, I thought, ‘I didn’t picture them this way.’

“The same thing is true of character attributes. We’ve all had the experience of watching a character’s personality in the show and thinking, ‘I’ll have to consider that for a moment.’

“It’s not as though I’ve ever been repulsed or objected to what I’ve seen so much as it has challenged me. You have to ask, might these characteristics have any basis in truth? Might they have been just as flawed as I am?”  

Brad described that Dallas wondered about Matthew, for instance, because of his meticulous concern about dates and lineage. While most scholars assume we see this in Matthew’s writing because he was directing his book to the Jews, teaching that Jesus was the fulfillment of prophecy, Dallas had some exposure to autism in his own family, and could see a parallel. The character of the talented Matthew, so good with numbers and sometimes awkward with people, was spun out of Dallas’s imagination, but it gives us real people to help viewers connect.

Brad said, “Do you know what has been the most satisfying thing for me about The Chosen is the impact it has had on my own family and me personally. Even though I am on the set and know all of the actors personally, when I sit in the theater and watch the show, it has the same impact on me as it does on the audience at large.

“I have to say with me, the show has deepened my relationship with scripture. It’s caused me to go read, both to check the validity of what I thought was being portrayed, but also to wonder if there might be another perspective that I hadn’t considered before.

“From day to day, I have the opportunity to receive emails and to meet people at airports or in meetings who have had deep emotional and spiritual satisfaction from the show. That’s the reward. I don’t care about a credit on a screen or leaving a legacy of making a show. What’s important is the lives that have been impacted.”

This is from the Pope’s own Instagram. Brad is pictured in the back.

Does Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus in the series, believe that Christ is the Messiah? 

Brad said, “Jonathan is by nature a spiritual and religious person. He’s a practicing Catholic, has a beautiful prayer and meditation practice in his life, and I think we see that in how he portrays Jesus. I think it would be difficult to act with the level of empathy that he does if he wasn’t holding his own relationship with Jesus close to him.. 

“Yet, I would say universally among the main characters on the show, all of them have had their own impact stories. That doesn’t mean that they’re all Christians or all practicing faith actively in their lives, but I would say all of them would describe their journey as not just informing, but reforming, transformational, and that the experience will be unmatched in their life. I think that’s how they feel. They hold on preciously to what we’re doing right now because they know it won’t last forever in terms of their day-to-day work. I’d say across the board, the actors are being refined and drawn to the specialness and the spirituality of the message, whether or not they fundamentally accept Jesus as Messiah. 

Never Dreamed

“For my own practice,” Brad said, “I approach each day, simply asking the Lord to use me as He desires, and trying to get out of the way, trying to make it not about me, not even about the show, but about Him. When I’m doing that, there are a multitude of miracles daily. There are things that happen at a macro level that I can look back and see all these significant milestones that were germinated by a seed of inspiration, or by a serendipitous connection. As a leader in the organization, I would say that there’s rarely a day that I don’t feel the guiding hand of the Lord.”

Brad said he would have never dreamed to be part of a worldwide production of such import. He said, “From a young age, I was fascinated with media and production, and after a couple of decades as a tech entrepreneur, I decided to enter the media world and got myself beat up pretty badly for a decade, only to finally surrender and say, ‘I guess this isn’t really for me. I’ve learned a lot, but it’s hard to make a business out of it.’

“In doing what I am doing now, I have to remain humbly appreciative, because I know that it’s not something that I could have created for myself, nor did I try to. Given the level of responsibility for what’s being done, it’s also something that I could never attempt to do on my own. I have to rely upon the Lord and those He brings into the broader sphere of influence.

“When you think about it, what does it take to do something like The Chosen? I would say it takes people of many faiths, or no faith, of qualifications around technical skills, but also around relational skills, and marketing skills, people who work to put this show in front of people. There’s so much to it and so many hundreds and hundreds of people that are contributing their gifts and talents to it, that I sit at the table in awe that I get to witness it. I get a front row seat to how this is all happening. 

“It feels a bit like maybe early leaders of the Restoration might have felt as they watched a book of scripture come out of the ground and become a force in the world, and temples being built. 

“When the Lord wants to do His work, He’ll do it with the weak things of the world, and I count myself among them.”