How church nearly cost me my acting career — Yemi Solade

Veteran Nollywood actor, Yemi Solade, has revealed how a clash with his former church almost ruined his acting career after a pastor instructed him to reject movie jobs that came up on Sundays.

He made the disclosure during a recent episode of the Honest Bunch podcast, where he narrated how a 2013 incident forced him to stop attending church.

According to Solade, church leaders insisted that he must reserve Sundays strictly for worship, a directive he described as impractical for someone in the entertainment industry.

“Something happened in my church. I got into the service with my wife that year, 2013,” he began.

“I’d been told in the church that I should tell producers not to call me for work on Sundays. And I cursed the pastor,” Solade said.

He argued that the demand was an attempt to interfere with his source of livelihood, stressing that the same money earned from his career was what he used to support the church.

“It is from that thing that you said I shouldn’t do on Sunday that I put hand in my pocket and I drop here. So when will I have time to work?

“There’s no way in the Bible that Sunday in the Greco-Roman calendar, that I set aside for people to go and assemble and shout God and Jesus.

“And you’re telling me not to leave my house and go to where my chop is. You want to ruin my career?” he said.

The actor added that leaving the church brought him more peace than constant attendance ever did.

“The notion that if you don’t attend church, once life we must die, probably I’ve not seen anything change.

“Rather, I have peace. I do well. Because every day of my life, when I was going to church, I got messages or sort of disturbances,” he noted.

Solade also criticised the culture of prioritising religious obligations over work, recalling how a technician once diverted part of the money he gave him for materials to his church.

“I had this Baba who fixed my AC, and I gave him money to buy some things one day, and I was calling him, and he didn’t pick the call.

“Later, he now told me he was in church. I said, Baba, you’re in your seventies.

“Do you know that you took my money to that church? You gave part of it. That blessing is mine now. It’s my money you went to drop there.

“If the prayer there is efficacious, it will come to me,” the actor said.

Beyond religion, Solade also addressed Nollywood’s roots, disputing claims that the industry started with the 1992 Igbo blockbuster Living in Bondage.

“One very popular account was that Nollywood started with Living in Bondage.

“The first movie that you call home video was actually produced by a man who is still alive, Ade Ajiboye, we call him Big Abbas.

“Shosho Meji, as produced by Ade Ajiboye, Big Abbas, was around 1988.

“Things Fall Apart on television now. It was in the 80s, mid 80s,” he explained.

The Obafemi Awolowo University-trained actor further claimed that the South-East was late in adopting theatre as an academic pursuit, unlike universities in the South-West where theatre studies had flourished since the 1980s.

“You cannot find to date any actor my age, or slightly younger, who will tell you he studied theatres in the East, because theatres never existed in the East.

“When I was a student in Ife, we had something we called NUTAF, Nigerian University Theatres Festival.

“Only six universities at that time, none existed in the East,” Solade said.

ALSO READ TOP STORIES FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE