Interview: Testament director Paul Syrstad on expanding and modernizing the book of Acts
The creator of the Angel series talks about "nerding out on the Bible," exploring relationships that are only hinted at in the text, and dealing with the hard, unanswered questions of scripture.
Paul Syrstad didn’t set out to modernize the book of Acts—not at first, anyway.
The British actor and filmmaker originally wanted to make some short films based on the parables of Jesus, showing how they connect to the present day. But then, as he puts it, he “came to the realization [that] nobody watches short films.”
So he turned the short films into a feature film, by creating a framing narrative in which the followers of Jesus tell each other the parables while hiding from the authorities after Jesus has gone—and because the parable sequences were set in the present day, the framing narrative was set in the present day, too.
The resulting film, Testament: The Parables Retold, was then picked up by Angel Studios, which started streaming the movie in 2022—and the folks at Angel asked Syrstad if he’d be interested in turning the framing device into a series. The result is Testament, a series that sets the book of Acts in an alternate version of the modern world.
The first two episodes started streaming on the Angel platform last Sunday—which, as Syrstad is keen to point out, was Pentecost, the day when Christians around the world remember the coming of the Holy Spirit, which happens to be the first event depicted in Syrstad’s series. (See Acts 2 for the biblical version of this story.)
Future episodes will arrive on the Angel app every Monday until July 21—and, to make the show freely available to everyone (at least for a little while), each episode will stream for a day or so on YouTube one week after it premieres.
I had a chance to speak to Syrstad over Zoom a few days before the first two episodes premiered. What follows is a transcript of our chat, edited for clarity, length, and to remove a spoiler or two that slipped into the discussion (oops!).
PTC: Just give me a sense of how this started. I know that there’s the series now, and before this there was the movie, but it looks to me like the movie is a collection of shorts that have some sort of connecting narrative tissue added to them.
PS: Yeah.
PTC: Like, did it start out as short films?
PS: Yeah, exactly. It was meant to be a series of short films, but it kind of came about because— I trained professionally as an actor and was working as an actor. And then kind of at one point during one job, God impressed on my heart just to kind of do something for him now with what I had, with what resources [I had]. So I kind of jumped behind the camera and thought, “OK, well, let’s make short films because they’re cheap and cheerful, or they can be at least.”
And so, yeah, I thought about doing these parables in these modern settings, [for] two reasons. One, a practicality. [Filming in a] modern setting is, for a low budget, cheaper. You can actually do what’s around.
But also, whenever I go to church and whenever I preach as well, there’s always this kind of— Preachers always try to bring the Bible into people’s here-and-now, into their situation right now. And I remember being on a trip with Compassion and chatting to one of the kids in a different country. And they were talking about the Good Samaritan. They went, “Yeah, because the parable of the Good Samaritan means all Samaritans are good.” I was like, “Oh, I can see how you’d get there. If you don’t know anything about the historical context, if you don’t know anything about the surrounding cultures, yeah, sure, I get that.”
So I kind of attempted to make these short films, just to pull out at least an aspect of these parables to connect with viewers today.
But I think when we were two or three down, I kind of came to the realization, nobody watches short films. And especially if you’re trying to make some kind of impact— You know, there’s not much faith-based stuff going on here in the UK. So I was like, “I’d like to make some sort of impact and some kind of proof that, hey, we can do stuff, even here.”
So that’s when I started penning what was then Testament: The Parables Retold—and, so [as] not to waste anything that we’d made, [it was] a story that would tie all these short films together in one thing.
So that was the birth of this kind of different world that would hold these things. That, of course, then got picked up by Angel and they laid down the gauntlet saying, “Do you want to make a series?” Why not?
PTC: Was it their idea?
PS: I mean, we always talked about it over here, but we made the movie for like, in dollars, under 50,000. So a TV series is just— It’s not feasible. Like, it’s not— You can’t do it. So when, in the meeting, they kind of went, “Have you thought about making a series?” We went, “Well, yeah, but we don’t know how we’d do it.”
And [they said], “Well, we can facilitate crowd-funds for you. We can try and get this off the ground and connect you with some finance.”
And so they got that ball rolling for us, which is great.
PTC: But it was their initiative that they actually brought it up in the conversation before you did? Like, you may have been thinking about it, but did they actually bring it up first in the conversation?
PS: Oh, literally. They said, “Have you ever thought about making a TV series?”
PTC: Wow.
PS: And, yeah, but I don’t know. It’s quite nice. You know, you have aspirations, you have hopes, and then God just allows someone else to speak it first. You’re like, “Okay, cool, I’ll follow.”
PTC: Is it fair to say that you sort of— I don’t mean this in a bad way, but did you sort of almost, like, walk backwards into this? Like, if you had started from scratch, would you have had the idea to set the book of Acts today? Or did you just sort of work into this because the parables were set in the modern day?
PS: Yeah, it’s a great question. Who knows? I think we’ve all— I mean, I’ve seen other people write—when we released the trailer—being like, “Oh, I once had this thought as well.” And it’s always been something that I’ve kind of— It’s crossed your mind, of going, “Oh yeah, Acts in the modern day,” or even the gospels in the modern day. But I probably wouldn’t have taken it as seriously to try and do this without—as you put it quite well, I think—walking backwards into it. Or walking blindfolded! Oh, yeah, I’ll keep going forward. We’re walking forward, but we’ll be blindfolded!
PTC: Sure, sure. So how do you then— Because I’m a huge history buff, and to me, the book of Acts is very situated in its historical context. And Luke, of all the gospel writers, is the most historically minded.
PS: Yeah, he is.
PTC: And now you’re sort of yanking it out of that historical background and creating this sort of alternate version of the modern era. How do you make the choices to translate that into that new setting where it’s not grounded in the history and yet it’s clearly telling the same kind of story. I mean, you’ve got characters in your film who are reading the Bible and talking about these Old Testament stories and it’s part of their past—and yet they’re clearly not first-century Jews, right? So how do you sort of make the choices in that kind of adaptation?
PS: Yeah, well, first, I mean, you know, to put it in probably not a fair term, I’d say the things that we’ve changed is the language that’s being spoken, the costumes that they’re wearing, some of the technology that exists, and the architecture. But aside from that, we’ve made the same story.
To do that, we’ve had to make certain alterations to the modern day. We keep talking about it being in an alternate modern world, and that’s because I don’t think you can do the story of Acts after the digital revolution. I think that kind of would change everything quite dramatically. So you can’t have, you know, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians would be his first draft email, and it would get, you know, forwarded this many times. And an analog world creates a sense of danger, threat, and well, just that imposition to have to literally carry something, to spread a message.
I guess the things that we’ve changed is, you know, there are some cars, they’re not that common. There are trains. We’ve decided, maybe for better or worse, not to include guns. So there’s still quite an analog weaponry. The thinking of that was, we kind of went down the route [that] if Christianity hadn’t started, you know, 2,000 years ago, well then Rome might have had a different trajectory. Wars create technology in such a way that, you know, advance the world. That’s probably the only positive thing about them. So we do kind of, like, suddenly have a stem off of our timeline.
So there’s been some decisions to make sure we can tell exactly the same story, just in this different… what’s it called? Aesthetic. That’s the main thing, but all the characters are the same. We’ve taken the full diversity of what church looks like today, the global church, and placed it in our city of Salem. You know, you have the Jewish diaspora, which if you look at the broad spectrum of people in the Jewish diaspora, it’s huge. It’s very diverse, which is beautiful.
PTC: You mentioned the city of Salem. What I find fascinating is this question of, like, what place names and people names can you use, because all cultures have a historical context and they all evolved historically in a historical setting. And so, do you just make up names? Like, is it important to avoid using words like “London, England”? Or do you just sort of use, like— I think there’s a scene in the first episode where somebody says, “I’m hearing the apostles speak in Hindi.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s an actual language.”
PS: Yeah, yeah.
PTC: But then I think later on, when you have the storyline where the deacons are appointed, the subtitles said the people [who are served by the deacons] were speaking in Ladino, which—
PS: Ladino, yes.
PTC: Is that an actual language?
PS: It is. It’s an ancient— It’s a dying-out language. It’s a Judeo-Spanish mix. So one of the Jewish diasporas, they have this language, but there’s very few people who speak it now. So including Ladino was just a bit of a nod, really, to go, “This language is still around.” And a nice way to portray the Hellenists in a bit of a different way.
PTC: Oh, okay. Because I thought maybe that was sort of another one of those little sidesteps—like, part of the alternate modern reality. But no, that’s an interesting Easter egg, if you will.
PS: Yeah, it is. I mean, it’s full of Easter eggs.
So, no, we don’t use “London”. Like, London doesn’t exist. Everything is as it is [in the book of Acts]. We’ve got Antioch, as mentioned, Cyprus, Lystra, all of these places. We’ve chosen to call the city “Salem”. I think there was a feeling that calling it “Jerusalem” might feel strange for viewers, and “Salem” is another word and another name given to the Holy City historically. So I thought “Salem” is close enough. It is accurate, but it’s not. I think some people may have had a problem with “Jerusalem”. So I wanted to be respectful, but still tell the same story. Same places, same names.
PTC: Well, part of the thing about modernizing the story is you have the freedom to make changes if you want to, because it’s not like a lot of other things where people get very nitpicky and insist that that isn’t the way things really were. I mean, your version is clearly different. It’s clearly set in its own world where you have the freedom to make some tweaks or revisions or whatever, and it’s trying to be true to the story but it’s not trying to be historically accurate, quote unquote. So how does that affect the writing of the story, in terms of telling the familiar stories while introducing elements that are fictitious or expand the narrative or things like that?
PS: Yeah, I mean, [one of the reasons] why I think the book of Acts is quite a fun story to adapt is because, you know, you have in verse one, for instance, Person A is in this location, and in the next verse, they’re in that location, and you’re like, “That’s 300 miles away.” And 28 chapters takes place over 30 years. There’s a lot of things that must have happened in between these verses.
I love nerding out on the Bible. It’s just really fun. And I think one of my favorite examples is you have Saul of Tarsus, Paul, who writes that he studied under the feet of Gamaliel, a teacher, a Pharisee of the Sanhedrin. And yet, earlier in our story, in the book of Acts, it is Gamaliel who defends the apostles once they’re all captured before the Sanhedrin and [he] makes sure they’re let go. But his student becomes the chief persecutor of the Church. So there’s a relationship here. And I’m like, “Okay, well, I mean, this is a beautiful tension that exists within the text.” No idea, of course, what happened. We’re not told what happened between those two. But we’re like, “Okay, well, let’s imagine what might have happened, what could have happened.”
So it’s using what is as the framework, and as an immovable framework. You know, the things that happen in the book of Acts are going to happen in our story. But we also get to, as you say, have some creative license—a bit in a different way than other shows do or other adaptations of the Bible do—to explore things in a bit of a different way. [And we] also [get to] ask the question, because we’re doing it in a modern setting, “What issues would early Christians face if it did happen today? You know, what things in our world?” Like, you know, Mary [Magdalene] ministers in a nightclub in episode three. It’s a very modern thing that you used to see in different kinds of movies. But that’s a setting that would exist if it was now.
So we were like, “Okay, well, how can these characters engage with elements that we recognize from our world today while still staying faithful to the historical people that they were in terms of the character traits that they display in the Bible and that we can learn from them?” And also, yeah, the guiding structure of scripture.
PTC: Right. Yeah, the nerding out. One of my favorite examples of things that are missing in the book of Acts is Paul writes in one of his letters, “I’ve survived three shipwrecks” [II Corinthians 11:25], and the book of Acts only mentions one [Acts 27:27-44]—and the one that it mentions took place after Paul wrote the letter.
PS: Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah.
PTC: So it’s like, okay, so there were maybe four shipwrecks, but there are clearly two or three that the book of Acts doesn’t even tell us about—it doesn’t have time for all that. It’s just one shipwreck.
PS: Yeah, Jackie, our producer, keeps reminding me there is a shipwreck coming, but thankfully it happens at the end of the book of Acts when our budgets might be a little higher. (chuckles)
PTC: Right, right. I actually like some of the subtlety of some of the references in the show. There’s a scene where Gamaliel meets with the Sadducees and they sort of say, “Oh, a Pharisee, are you going to join us?” And he says, “Maybe in the next life.” And it’s not explained why that’s funny. Some people would be inclined to explain everything to the audience, but that was just like a nice little, “Okay, if you know about the differences of belief between Pharisee and Sadducee, you get it.”
PS: Yeah, exactly. Like, I don’t know, we could pander to every single different audience type, but for me, the fun is when I revisit one of my favourite movies years later that I enjoyed as a kid, and suddenly I get a whole different aspect of it because I’m older, I’m probably a little wiser. So it’s the same thing. Paul talks about milk and meat, and what I hope is the series, in a front-facing way, is like milk, is the easy thing to be able to take and being introduced to the story of Jesus. But actually, if you then get introduced, you might want a little more, and then there’s more in there. But actually, the best meat is obviously the Bible. That’s way more fun, way better.
PTC: Yeah. Your series also introduces a couple of elements that are favourites of mine, if I can put it that way. One of my favourite books in the Bible is the book of Ruth, and I noticed these Ruth references in the series. At the very beginning, Stephen is reading the book of Ruth, and then you later on have a character named Mara who goes by the code name Naomi, which I thought was an interesting flip. [The biblical Ruth’s mother-in-law was named Naomi, and Naomi asked her friends to call her Mara, in Ruth 1:20.] So do you have a special, I don’t know, attraction to the book of Ruth? Is that a special favourite of yours?
PS: No, it’s actually what happens during Pentecost in Jewish traditions—or, as you know, in Jewish it’s Shavuot—is people stay up all night reading the book of Ruth. That is part of the tradition of that festival. So they wouldn’t have slept, which is why, you know, you begin with Stephen, eyes closed, not quite awake, because they’ve been eating dairy all night and reading the book of Ruth.
When I was writing the episode, I just wanted to learn as much [as possible] of what might happen at the festival of Shavuot, because Pentecost is not something that we commonly— Like, we hear of Passover a lot, we’ve studied that a fair bit, but I don’t hear Pentecost, pre-Christian Pentecost, talked about that much.
PTC: But you kept it going with the character Mara and her name—the name play there and stuff like that.
PS: Yeah, Mara was because the name means “bitter” and we just thought that fitted the character so well. And so, yeah, when she has to disguise herself, we just thought it’s a wonderful nod—why not?—to just go for the exact flip and just [have her] pretend to be not bitter and then come back to bitter. So it was certainly a nod to the book of Ruth, but just because I really enjoyed the name change.
PTC: Okay. And another bit of a pet subject of mine—I’ve been beating this drum for years—is the lack of movies about adult brother-sister relationships. And I love the fact that your series has all these scenes with Paul and his sister, because Paul, the biblical Paul, does have a sister and a nephew who are almost never depicted in film. That’s one of the more interesting, for me, creative elements in the series.
PS: Yeah, and again, it’s that thing of, like, we’ve written a lot of Season 1 with, God willing, future seasons in mind. There’s a lot of things that we’ve planted and placed for later development. So I think it would be odd— If we’re introducing Saul so early, and then you get to much later in the book of Acts when suddenly his nephew turns up, we need to at least know that that family exists.
And, yeah, brother-sister relationships are always fun to dive into. In fact, I wrote the show with Faith, my wife, and her brother, Kenneth. So we’ve already got a brother-sister relationship in the writing team. So they can always fact-check that, going, “That’s not how brothers and sisters talk!”
PTC: We talked about Pentecost and Stephen. Can you talk about the decision to start the series not with the apostles, but with Stephen? You’re showing Pentecost initially from Stephen’s point of view. What was the thinking behind that?
PS: Again, there’s a practical one and a creative one. Practical reason is the problem with doing the book of Acts as a TV show is there’s twelve main characters straight away. And it’s too many for anyone to [get a handle on], and you can’t introduce them all, but they’re just the Twelve, and it’s, “Boom.”
So to enter this world, we needed somebody to enter it with. And of course we don’t know when Stephen joined the faith. We don’t know if it was pre-Pentecost. We don’t know if it was post-Pentecost. We have no idea, it doesn’t say anywhere. But because of what we wanted to develop in this series thematically, Stephen just became the perfect person to do it with.
So yeah, most people would start the story of the book of Acts in the upper room. And I thought, “Well, to be honest, you and I and everyone else that will ever watch this show or read the Bible, we’re not in the upper room. And we can only imagine what’s in the upper room.” So why put us there to begin with? Why not place us where we might be first, which is in the courtyard? We would be downstairs. We’d be listening and hearing and first listening to the message.
We didn’t get the privilege of spending three years with Jesus. We are the ones that he says, “Blessed are those who have not seen.” That’s us. So I think starting the story with someone who would be in that stance—I don’t know if that’s the right phrase—for me, at least, I would connect to that a lot easier. Obviously we’d love, like, jumping in with Peter and John and the rest of them. But for me, I just wanted to connect in a way that I do connect with the faith and with Jesus, which is not ever getting to see him in this life.
PTC: There’s a few other ways that your series sort of re-centres or de-centres—I’m not sure what the right word is—perspective. Like the way that Gamaliel doesn’t know why Yusuf [i.e. Joseph of Arimathea] has disappeared. And of course, if you know the story, you can kind of guess where this is coming from. But the characters that you’re watching are sort of figuring out, like, what happened? And even the way that Caiaphas is surprised when Pentecost happens, and he says, “It’s been over a month [since Jesus was crucified]!” I honestly don’t know if I’d ever really thought about the fact that from Caiaphas’s point of view, this had been settled for over a month and then suddenly this happens, you know.
PS: I really had to, like, read a lot about what was most plausible.
I mean, I really enjoyed Risen, which was a fun film a few years ago. And that was about the manhunt.
There’s that verse in Matthew’s gospel, where he writes that Caiaphas says to the guards, “If Pilate finds out, we’ll protect you.” So just that statement alone would say, “Well, we’re not going to tell Pilate.” And it’s in their best interest to keep it hushed. It’s in the guards’ best interest to keep it hushed because, otherwise, penalty of death. I read the wonderful book Who Moved the Stone?, which also kind of put this [idea front and] centre as well.
And I thought, you know, who knows—we don’t know—but I don’t think that there was a manhunt that early on, ’cause from a human perspective of looking at each of their motivations, the kind of narrative that we placed is the logical one that I landed on. But I’m sure there are much smarter people than me who might argue.
PTC: Yeah, like basically the tomb is empty, but almost nobody knows. Like, the disciples know, but they’re in hiding for like a month and a half.
PS: Exactly.
PTC: And yeah, the priests and the guards have reasons not to publicize it either.
PS: Of course.
PTC: And so, yeah, what I love is that the priests [in Testament] aren’t even sharing the information among themselves.
PS: I mean, one thing I do quite love about what we’ve done in the writing, if I may enjoy something, is the fact that when you get told the story of what happened, you’re only ever told what the priests believe. You’re never actually told the other side.
Like, early on— I mean, the whole first episode, really—apart from Mary, who tries to kind of communicate to Esther [Stephen’s mother] at this point—it’s on the side of the temple that they’re going, “This is a lie, this is a lie.” And it’s only at the end of episode one you go, “This might be true.”
PTC: Yeah, and I thought it was fascinating also how your series gets into some tricky questions. Like, for example, there’s the healing of the lame man and the fact that he doesn’t respond to the healing the way Stephen expected him to. And you really do dive into the whole Ananias and Sapphira story, and I thought it was really interesting how Peter sort of tries to draw a larger lesson out of this experience.
PS: Yeah, we like dealing with some unfinished and, you know, unanswered and hard questions, but especially with Ananias and Sapphira. I don’t know, Peter, if you were told by God what you had to do, and you had to be present in front of and almost act as this lawyer for, you know, God, the judge— I don’t know, but if it was me, I would be shaken to my core. I would be terrified. I would be broken, at least for a period of time.
I mean, again, that’s just how I think, if I saw that happen in front of me— I don’t think death at any point is something to smile about, or to boast in, or to be like, “Ha, here’s the power of God.” It’s like, no, here is the power of God, and it is the fear of the Lord. And to engage with that on a real human heavy level—
Yeah, we took that episode quite slow and very deliberately, and what effect it has on Peter. Because the bizarre thing about that story in the Bible is that as soon as that happens, the next verse is how people came to the faith, and the community grew, and the church grew. So that’s why the hopeful response doesn’t come from the apostles, it comes from the people. Because it’s, yeah, it’s a hard story.
PTC: I just want to ask a few questions about the future, future seasons, maybe. You mentioned that the book of Acts covers 30 years. I don’t know if you’re planning on covering a 30-year scope with the film or how far into the book of Acts you’re planning on getting. And also, according to the press notes, you are working on a film about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. How did that come up, and how is that going to fit into your schedule?
PS: The schedule thing? No idea. Well, let’s go one at a time, shall we?
The series? No, I would love to do the whole series, all 28 chapters—obviously 27 because we didn’t do chapter one. That’s what I’d really love to do. Obviously, the time span— I think the fact that we have cars and trains means that we can maybe shrink the time that everything takes a little bit down, so our actors don’t have to age 30 years as we go about it. Maybe they will, maybe it’ll take that long.
But yeah, no, I’d love to. As we said, we’re very intentional about how we’ve plotted out these characters so that they can develop. And there are some plans, especially for the second season, of what we really want to do and how we want audiences to feel about certain characters. We want to make it hard.
You know, the book of Acts isn’t easy. It’s easy if you just skim it, but actually, if you really take it in and if you really try and grapple with some of the things that happen, it’s not an easy book. And it’s good to grapple. It’s good to question. It’s good to wrestle with God. I think that’s what we’re trying to try to get people to do.
Re: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, the film—Fellowship—that was because when I went over to Angel to do the “Illuminate” event, it was the first time when we brought our movie, Testament: The Parables Retold. They said, “We have something we want to pitch you.” And I said, “Okay.” So they brought me upstairs and they said, “So we want to tell the story of the faith, fantasy, and friendship of—” And I just went, “C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.” And I knew at that point, if I had the names right, this was good, a good project. If they said anyone else, I’d be like, it’s not for me.
But they were like, yes. Right. So they kind of got us to make, over here in the UK, an 11-minute pilot of the movie. So we did that—actually, Peter Morton, who plays Barnabas in our show, he played C.S. Lewis in that, did a wonderful job. And that kind of went through the Angel process, got through the Guild. I think it won the award for the highest thing that year at Illuminate. And so, yeah, now the guys are working on raising the funding and getting some cast attached to make that film. So I think the aim is to do it at the end of the year, but we’ll see, God willing.
Testament: The Parables Retold and the first two episodes of the Testament series are currently streaming on the Angel app and website. New episodes will come out every Monday until July 21.