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April 9, 2026

Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­ Professor Russell Schultz takes on the face of a nation

As America celebrates her 250 years as a nation, George Washington portrayals will predictably reach a fever pitch well beyond Independence Day. But for the Santa Fe College (Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­) community, the unmistakable persona of the "Father of Our Country" might give way to another familiar face on movie screens across the nation starting April 3 — albeit behind a prosthetic nose and historically accurate false teeth.

Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­ Associate Professor Russell Schultz plays President George Washington in the feature film "A Great Awakening," which pulled in $2.1 million in domestic box office returns when it opened on 1,289 theater screens across America on Easter weekend.

The film explores the unique relationship between Founding Father/U.S. Constitution co-author Benjamin Franklin and English evangelist George Whitefield, who challenged Franklin's spiritual underpinnings, providentially inspiring the Second Continental Congress and the "Committee of Five," that proposed that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with a right to life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The subject matter for Schultz hearkens back to a similar onstage stint during his first semester in graduate school at the University of Florida. He was cast in the eponymous role for a play called "George Washington's Boy," written by actor Ted Lange — more widely remembered as Isaac, the bartender from 1970s TV series "The Love Boat" — alongside a fellow UF classmate who would later direct performances for Sight & Sound Theatres, the Pennsylvania-based company behind "A Great Awakening." Several years after graduation, Schultz received an unsolicited email from a Sight & Sound casting director about his interest in auditioning for an undisclosed part.

"They didn't tell me what the project was, or even the role," Schultz said. "I assumed they were just wanting a self-tape demo but said 'We want you to come up to Pennsylvania.' It was a full screen test with makeup, costume, performing into a camera. About a month later, they offered me the role."

Schultz traveled back to Pennsylvania for fittings, molds and impressions to create prosthetics of Washington's nose and hand-crafted teeth, then a few shuttles back and forth to wrap his scenes. The movie held a private premier in December 2025, which Schultz couldn't attend due to college finals and his teaching duties at Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­. "I haven't even seen the film yet," he said. "I'm just as eager to see it as everybody else."

The modest seeds of "A Great Awakening" were actually sown around the last monumental patriotic celebration, during America's Bicentennial in 1976. That was the year farmer/hobbyist photographer Glenn Eshelman opened a dedicated studio in the heart of Pennsylvania's Amish community to show audiences slide presentations of his family travels.

The local novelty enterprise somehow blossomed into a family business called Sight & Sound Theatres which became virally popular in the region for producing dramatic interpretations of biblical and historical stories, with original music, elaborate sets, and eventually a 2,000-seat theater in Lancaster (late 1990s), then in Branson, Missouri (2008).

When COVID quashed live presentations in 2020, the company began adapting their production to the screen — first for DVD, then the silver screen — exponentially opening up their audience base to stories of hope and redemption, with the help of distributors like Angel Studios and Roadside Attractions.

Schultz's own path to portraying the movie's supporting role of George Washington is worthy of a Sight & Sound Films character.

A member of Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­'s Fine Arts faculty, Schultz got the acting bug growing up in Dallas around age 6, at a time when every kid wanted to be the next Roger Staubach.

"Not being into sports or an athlete, you were invisible if you didn't," he said. "But I realized that, when I did talent shows as a kid, I could entertain people and make them laugh. I was small for my age, but I felt like a giant on stage."

Going to a small liberal arts college in Iowa on a German scholarship, Schultz didn't see acting as a viable vocational path, so he started school as a business major, but quickly jettisoned the idea after a couple weeks of accounting classes. "My mind just doesn't operate that way," he said.

Schultz quietly switched his major to acting after watching a classmate perform on the stage, and resolved to apply the same businesslike approach to this pursuit even though he hadn't yet sniffed a single line of Hamlet. "I had to explain to my parents about the decision, but after that first acting class in the spring of my freshman year, I never looked back. I think they could also sense that I might be a good teacher."

As a junior, Schultz said, he was given leeway to instruct underclassmen in the acting pedagogy taught at the college. "I was as an unofficial T.A. — we didn't have a graduate program — but the faculty trusted me enough to mentor these other students, and I began to develop my own teaching approach."

After some local theater/TV and commercials back in Dallas following graduation, the allure of the Big Apple beckoned. Like a scene from "Mr. Holland's Opus," Schultz sold his car to finance a shot at fame in New York City.

Then came 9/11.

The seismic events shifted Schultz's focus to serve in some way, and he took a job as a project manager while earning a graduate degree from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in security management. He provided protection assessment and oversight for an elite clientele — the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Sotheby's — until, "I felt like I had done my thing in New York, and I wanted to move on to a place with beaches and water, where I could have a car," Schultz said.

A new opportunity in Florida translated his high-profile experience to installing security systems for NASA in their launch towers, but the stress and unpredictability of the job was visibly wearing on Schultz and his new bride, Deidre, who counseled, "You're going to be dead before 50 if you keep this up; what do you want to do?"

She convinced Schultz to keep pursuing his theatrical passion and follow his early teaching instincts and get his master's credentials. With the first of six Schultz kids on the way, Deidre kept the new dad on task for the family's redirection, prodding him to attend auditions heading into the gauntlet of fatherhood and post-grad studies.

"I went to an audition back in New York for a bunch of graduate schools, and received offers from five of them," Schultz said. "I chose UF because we were close to Gainesville, and they had the best voice teacher in the country where I was concerned, Yanci Bukovec, a Hungarian artist/mime who was Marcel Marceau's performance partner for years. He was a mime who taught voice; I was blown away by that ... a complete performer."

The experience imparted an attention to craft that came through in Schultz's deep dive about the first president's life, right down to what a late-1780s Virginia accent might sound like coming through Washington's famous store-bought dentures — a combination of sheep and human teeth with integrated springs.

"He was a quiet man, perhaps because of the teeth," Schultz explained. "I got my prosthetic teeth the day before the first scenes, and when I put them in, everything clicked. There were reports from his inaugural address that Washington was a soft talker who no one could easily hear. According to the directors, I look a lot like him — they were always comparing me to $1 bills."

Being a teacher at heart, Schultz appreciates the cinematic civics lesson that revisits a question perhaps more crucial now in America than ever with political discourse being dangerously fractured. "Of great concern to Washington was 'Now that we've got this, how do we keep it?'" Schultz said.

"The Founders were far from perfect," he said. "There were serious disagreements, and they were getting nowhere [at the Convention]. In the end, nobody got all they wanted; this was an imperfect compromise that everyone was tepid about when they walked away from it. But it shows that even we — like they were in the late 1780s — can be very opposed to each other, and still hammer out something we believe in that is much bigger than ourselves."

Schultz expresses a similar sentiment about his acting vocation. "That's why I don't care about my screen time," he said. "What's best about film is moments. I love that! I was so thankful to be a part of portraying this. I want to see storytelling where characters develop, struggle and go through change. These are the stories that I want to tell. Things that give us hope — redemption stories."