Cameron Arnett’s career in Hollywood is a play with two acts.
“This acting thing chose me twice, at two different points in time,” the celebrity told CBN News.
When he first went to Tinseltown, the now-63-year-old star was not a Christian. In fact, he wasn’t really even interested in acting; as a pre-med and pre-law student planning to pursue a career as a cardiologist, work in Hollywood was, as he called it, an “accident.”
Arnett was quickly caught up in the “trappings” Hollywood offered him, though. Chasing dollar signs and stardom, the fledgling actor was taking on episodic roles on shows like “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Miami Vice” and starring in made-for-TV movies.
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Along the way, though, the actor underwent a spiritual awakening.
He had just finished filming a movie in Toronto and was back home in Los Angeles, ready to sign a contract for a new project as a character in a TV series—but something had changed within Arnett.
“I was about to sign on the dotted line and they said, ‘Oh, by the way, we want Cameron to do partial-body nudity,’ and, by that point in time, I was a Christian,” Arnett recalled. “I said, ‘I can’t do that. It violates my convictions, violates my God, my beliefs.’”
The studio offered Arnett an alternative: they would bring in a body double for the nude scenes. That solution—the actor thought—would assuage his convictions.
But it didn’t. It only served to strengthen his reservations, and it cost him significantly.
“I’m about to sign again and I feel the Holy Spirit really tap me on my shoulder and say, ‘You have to shun even the appearance of evil, because people will think that it’s you,’” Arnett said, referring to 1 Thessalonians 5:22-24. “So I dropped everything and, when I dropped everything, everybody dropped me, as well. I lost everything, lost everybody, agency and everything else and ended up, really, abandoned in California, not knowing what else I was going to do next.”
“But God had His plan and all of that was allowing … all of the life that I had put together to unravel so that God could give me exactly what He wanted,” he continued. “That’s where I find myself now, having left Hollywood behind, having made all the choices that were anti-Hollywood and really getting back into a place where Christ was the center and, in that center, I found myself once again.”
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Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2024 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.
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