Actor, director and creator David Henrie is best known for his roles on Disney’s “Wizards of Waverly Place” and the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” Beyond his acting career, David has been an outspoken advocate for his Catholic faith, using his platform to share the importance of prayer, family and living out the Faith in everyday life. As a husband, father and filmmaker, he strives to bring meaningful and faith-filled stories to the screen. We’re thrilled to discuss in this issue his journey, his inspirations and how he integrates his faith into his work in Hollywood.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Our Sunday Visitor: Your Catholic faith has been an important part of your journey in Hollywood. How do you maintain and nurture your faith in an industry that often presents challenges to it?
David Henrie: I came to it, so I have that zeal that converts have. I fell in love with the Faith. It gave my life direction. I was steeped in relativism, steeped in the world, and I exhausted those things. I call it my “bubblegum theory” of pleasure. If you’re living for pleasure as an end, it always loses its savor. It’s like a piece of bubblegum. You pop it in, and it’s going to lose its flavor. So, you just keep popping bubblegum, but eventually, it’s disgusting.
All of the things I would get: the house, the accolades, the respect, honor, whatever — it just wasn’t giving me a sense of fulfillment. It left me in an existential crisis. I needed something deeper, something true. It was such a cluttered and confusing time for me. My dad raised me with a lot of really good instincts, and I couldn’t find a belief system that fulfilled those or brought those to life until I found it in the Catholic Church.
Our Sunday Visitor: You’ve spoken in the past about your devotion to the Rosary. How has praying the Rosary impacted your personal life and career as an actor?
Henrie: It’s massive. It’s nonnegotiable, every single day, for my whole family. I proposed to my wife on the feast of the Most Holy Rosary (I did a novena leading up to it). It was something that brought us together very early on. (I have a beautiful Spanish oil painting of St. Dominic, from the late 1700s or early 1800s, which is one of the centerpieces in my home.)
The Rosary is such a central devotion because it really involves all the senses, right? You have touch. You’re seeing something. You’re feeling something. It really is a wonderful meditative experience. You’re calling and drawing your mind to higher things; it’s such a great way to pray.
Before I pray the Rosary every day, I say to my kids, “What are the three rules of the Rosary?” They know them, they repeat them verbatim: “Sit, pray and be quiet.” It helps them be quiet in church — it really does! A friend told us this a long time ago, and it really helped us. We couldn’t get our kids to be quiet in church. It was really difficult; they’re little, you know? And a friend told us to work on getting them to be quiet, to sit and think and be restful while you’re praying the Rosary. That’s a great way to train them.
Don’t let them run all over the place. Do it in the same place every day. If you have a couch you pray it on, everyone get on that couch. Make it clear that this is the time when we pray, when we honor God, so let’s all be serious. And that has really helped!
Our Sunday Visitor: How do you see the role of media and storytelling in evangelization? Do you think there is a growing space for faith-based content in mainstream media?
Henrie: My whole thing is using the transcendentals to entertain and elevate audiences. Injecting truth, beauty and goodness in whatever I’m doing to entertain and elevate audiences. I’m making my first faith-based show, which is for 7 to 11-year-olds and their parents. It is a show where we’re going to learn about the saints, so it’ll be two live-action brother adventures — me and my real brother. We visit a location important to the saint and we tap a device and we morph into an animated cartoon, and we go on an adventure with that saint.
It starts live action, so that you can see that the saint is real. It’s not a fairytale, it’s a real thing. We see where the saint walked, lived, breathed, and then we lock onto something that was important to the saint. What I love about this is that we’re gonna show a lot of the moments that make the saint a saint.
Our Sunday Visitor: In addition to all your studio projects, I’ve seen you taking an active involvement with Cross Catholic Outreach. Can you tell us what “Box of Joy” is and why it’s important to you?
Henrie: I fell in love with this as a father. Every Advent season, parents of goodwill ask: What can we do to help teach our kids the corporal works of mercy? What can we do to teach our kids about the true spirit of Christmas? There’s not a lot of answers out there. There are little things you can Google, but the goal is to try to give your kids an experience they can remember. Box of Joy solved it for me because it was the answer to really bring the season of Christmas to life. Box of Joy is essentially a shoebox filled with little toys and supplies that’s probably the first Christmas gift kids in Third World countries will ever receive.
I went on a mission trip last year to the Dominican Republic, and we brought thousands of these Boxes of Joy to some of the communities out there. They’re living in absolute poverty. I could tell our boxes were the first Christmas presents they’d ever received! It’s an extension of Christ’s love, ultimately. There are rosaries in the boxes, there’s a little Jesus, there’s little toy airplanes, balls, yo-yos, maybe little sewing kits: things that are a little more practical. It was so fun, because I packed the boxes with my kids. That’s the experience part that we’re talking about. I went to the toy store with my kids, and I explained that there’s little kids out there who don’t have food and who don’t have toys, who lack what they need.
My kids could not believe it. To this day — and it’s been a year since I did that — my son, every single day when we pray before a meal, prays for the poor boys and the poor girls that don’t have food. Even if we have extra food at the dinner table, my kids want to box it for the poor. I didn’t teach them that, they made the connection.
Our Sunday Visitor: Looking forward to Christmas, what are one or two things that are going to be hallmarks for you this Advent season? How in the upcoming days are you going to renew your spiritual life?
Henrie: I love liturgical living. My wife and I love it. I’m a creative, right? I love making movies and shows and creating worlds, so I love that the season is so visual. It has colors that are associated with it and smells even that can be associated with it. Advent has types of food. I love it when Advent comes up because we start to wrap the home differently.
The tablescapes change. My wife does these simmer-pot things that give the season a smell. We try to involve all the senses in the house. We cut back on meat. And we don’t decorate the house until Christmas is here. We do little things: On St. Lucy’s Day we start to introduce some Christmas lights into the house or small decorations, but we hold off on that to build the anticipation for the season.
I love Advent because there’s so much visually that you can do to teach your kids without even teaching. It’s just you, as parents, setting aside some time to be focused and get the house in the spirit of the season. Then Christmas comes in and — boom — everything’s there! We decorate the house before midnight Mass, and then when we get back from midnight Mass, everything is turned on, and lit, and huge, and big! That’s the time of the year when our house is the most decadent, because the light of Christ has come to earth.
You can bless a child by going online to boxofjoy.org and donating a Box of Joy. Team Joy will pack and send a Box of Joy on your behalf to a child in need in a developing country. Your gift may be the FIRST Christmas gift that child has ever received.
