If you watched television at all in the past several decades, there’s a good chance Ted McGinley was on one of your favorite shows. Just a few of his shows on his lengthy resume include Happy Days, The Love Boat, Dynasty, Married with Children, Sports Night, The West Wing and Hope & Faith. He can now be seen in the film, Do You Believe? from the creators of God’s Not Dead. In Do You Believe?, he plays a local pastor who is shaken to the core by the visible faith of an old street-corner preacher and is reminded that true belief always requires action. His response ignites a faith-fueled journey that powerfully impacts everyone it touches. Do You Believe? co-stars Mira Sorvino, Sean Astin, Alexa PenaVega, Delroy Lindo, Brian Bosworth, Cybil Shepherd and Lee Majors. Ted recently sat down to discuss his role in the film.

Your character is sort of the catalyst in the movie.

As an actor looking at the script, that is really attractive. You can’t be cut from the movie [laughs] if you’re in the beginning, the middle and the end. You know you’re not going anywhere.

How did you prepare to play a preacher?

I grew up going to all kinds of different churches. We went all over the place as a kid. At one time, I actually wanted to be a preacher, or a priest actually since my granddad is from Ireland. I was very drawn to [the idea of being a preacher]. I didn’t realize then, but I know now that when you’re a pastor or a preacher, the power you have of delivering a message can literally change someone’s life, including your own. It’s almost magical and I think that’s what I related to. This was like the perfect [role for me] because now I get to play the character I always wanted to be. [My character] Pastor Matthew has a wife who is infertile and this [causes friction] in their relationship. [In my research for the role] I realized that you’re in charge of a large community of people and so much of your [affection] goes outward and sometimes the people you love the most are overlooked. My character just couldn’t take care of my wife because her pain was so great.

Then there’s the scene where I drive down the street and see a young, pregnant girl who has nowhere to go and it seems like this baby will belong to someone who doesn’t really care. This is like THAT moment for my character. I bring this girl home and my wife asks, ‘what are you doing? You’ve got to get her out of here. What about me? What about our family?’ Then [our characters] have this amazing journey of figuring out how to resolve this. I don’t want to give away the ending, but it all comes full circle. At the end of the movie, the baby is born in a very, very difficult situation. When we filmed this scene on the bridge, it took six nights. The whole movie was filmed at night so you go to work at five in the afternoon and go home at seven in the morning.

On the bridge [in the climactic scene], there are a bunch of car accidents. This movie has literally everything that a mainstream movie has – drama, action, love – it has everything. In this particular scene, there’s one car accident after another on this bridge. Cybil Shepherd’s car is teetering over the bridge. She’s with a little girl, Makenzie Moss, who’s going to be a big star one day. She’s also with Lee Majors and you’re always in good hands with The Six Million Dollar Man [laughs]. Cybil had never been in a gimbal. [A gimbal is a mechanism that permits the car to tilt freely, in effect suspending the car so that it will remain horizontal even when its support is tipped over the edge of the bridge.] It feels like you’re going to fall so Cybil’s screaming. She’s swearing. Cybil had to pay Makenzie non-stop for swearing. Makenzie had told Cybil, ‘my mom pays me [when she swears].’ Cybil made no money for the movie [laughs]. Lee on the other hand was like, ‘tip the car more!’

We knew it would be raining during the scene, so whenever it wasn’t actually raining, we had a rain machine. It’s in the middle of the night, you’re cold, we’re in Michigan and the wind would pick up and that rain was brutal. Now I have to deliver a baby in this. And it’s a real baby, a brand new real baby. It was brutal trying to shield him from the elements. The crew was spraying me down [with rain] like crazy while it’s happening and I had to protect the baby. It was miserable to shoot that scene in that moment, but the final cut was fantastic.

At the end of the day, Do You Believe? is a genre film and faith-based movies don’t usually do well at the box office or get you invited on the talk shows. Did you have any hesitation in taking the role?

There’s always hesitation when you work on a genre project because genres eliminate a great number of people. There are a great number of people who won’t see sci-fi movies. Or they won’t see a faith-based movie. Whatever the genre is, there’s a group of people who don’t like the genre. Once you put a film in a category, you eliminate people. It’s the same when someone asks you on a talk show like Letterman. It’s entertainment. They don’t want you to beat people over the head with a message. There are places for that message, but on Letterman, it’s ‘be funny, be clever, whatever.’ Hopefully from that, someone will see the movie and get the message. There’s a time and place. Sometimes with faith-based films, it’s a little confusing. If you find the right time and place, people are willing to listen. They just don’t want to be beat over the head with it.

Let’s say you’re driving and you pass a homeless person, like we all do every day. You can’t stop because you can’t take care of everyone. You have to acknowledge that they’re there. They might not share the same views and values as you, but they count. They matter.

What do you want audiences to take away from this movie?

Cybil Shepherd’s character is dealing with the loss of her child. She is broken beyond repair and she doesn’t know it. Her life has stopped. Her husband who loves her, stays with her, even though the relationship is dysfunctional at best. In today’s world when people leave when things get too difficult, he’s there. He believes that somewhere, somehow, God will makes this right. Many people have lived through the loss of a child like Cybil’s character and questioned why. This movie asks the hard questions about when you’re in your deepest, darkest hour. People do not change easily and we do not accept change well either. If you can hang on, though, you’re never alone.

I’m totally changing the subject here, which I like to do, but you’re the first cast member I’ve met from Dynasty.

Really? You haven’t met Heather Locklear?

Not yet. You’re the first.

That was new for me doing the soap opera-y thing where you had to do the same thing four weeks in a row. The producers loved the guys on the show to [he turns his head to act out the classic soap opera head turn with the seductive bedroom eyes stare]. I was not going to do that, but we had so much fun.

I bet it was.

We really did have fun. That was a fun show. I had friends who would never visit me on the set of any show, but they’d be lining up to visit me on Dynasty.

Do You Believe? is playing in select theaters now.