Be Your Best Issue 002
The Book I've Handed People My Whole Life
Thirty years ago I read it. Four years ago I set out to film it. You can watch it on Amazon Prime right now.
A letter from Jeremy
I have handed people the Pendragon Cycle my whole life.
I read Stephen Lawhead’s novels almost thirty years ago. They showed me a Christianity with dirt on it — a faith arriving in a hard country among people with every reason to distrust it, carried by men who argue themselves into it under pressure and sometimes lose. It was not the Christianity of my youth — nice, safe, soft. It changed my view of my faith and my work in the world.
Prestige fantasy spent a decade and a fortune teaching audiences that everyone is compromised, nothing is sacred, and the honest ending is the bleak one. I did not make a conservative show, and Pendragon is not a partisan one. I made a show that rejects nihilism and despair — where a man’s choices matter.
We filmed the show in Hungary and Italy, outside the studio system, with a cast almost nobody had heard of, because I never wanted an actor bigger than the project. We were blessed with one of the finest casts of relatively unknown actors ever assembled.
“It represents the culmination of a decades-long vision to create culture, not just to criticize it. Lawhead’s novels present a visceral Christianity in a world of conflict and mystery. It isn’t saccharine or clean. In short, it is very much like our world.”
Jeremy Boreing, creator, director, executive producer
The Pendragon Cycle has been streaming in Britain, Ireland, Spain and Portugal all summer. It reached No. 3 in the United Kingdom and held Prime Video’s Top 10 for 38 days. In Spain it charted for 44 days. Watching those audiences find it on their own, without anyone telling them to, has been one of the great joys of my career.
It is on Amazon Prime in America right now.
Four years ago we took on the woke in commerce, and you are the reason that worked. This is the same fight on a different field.