How working in Vail area schools transformed the life of ‘The Chosen’ star Elijah Alexander
After the pandemic brought him to Vail, local students steered him toward education
Vail Christian High School/Courtesy Photo
Elijah Alexander has been a professional actor for the last 28 years, but recently he’s taken on a new role in education. That career shift started right here in Eagle County.
After graduating from the University of Michigan, Alexander studied drama at Yale and then jumped into a career in acting. Over the years, he’s been in numerous on-stage productions, Shakespeare companies and festivals, and film and TV productions.
In the last few years, Alexander has become more widely known as Atticus Aemilius in “The Chosen,” a historical drama based on the life of Jesus. The show — and Alexander — just wrapped filming on the TV show’s fourth season.
However, like many, the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted his career and threw him into the unknown. At the start of the pandemic, Alexander was part of a play in Houston that shut down, like everything else, in March 2020.
“I left Houston and didn’t have anywhere to go, and my business was upside down; in the acting industry, there was nothing being done,” Alexander said. “At the time I was in dire need of employment, a home and a community.”
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So, he called up an old friend who has been working in property management in Vail for around 30 years. His friend offered him a job, and shortly after moving, Alexander began to find other work as well.
“I moved to the Vail Valley and started wearing lots of different hats,” he said.
One of those hats was serving as a permanent substitute teacher at Red Canyon High School for a year, an experience that Alexander referred to as “transformative.”
“That completely changed my life, working with those kids,” he said. “I knew from that point forward I wanted to use the skill set I spent 30 years developing toward education.”
‘The Mitzvah Project’
Around this same time, several other things began to come together that reshaped his life and the work he does.
He booked the job on “The Chosen,” and he began traveling back and forth between Vail and Dallas and Provo, Utah, to shoot the show. Being on the show and seeing the worldwide impact it has had has “been a huge part of the change that has occurred in my life,” Alexander said.
“I’ve seen the kind of impact something that has real light at its core can have on the world and now I try to just to have as great an impact, as positive an impact as I can,” he added.
He also connected with two people. The first was Roger Grunwald, who is the founder of a 70-minute Holocaust and social justice-themed program called “The Mitzvah Project.” Grunwald’s mother was a survivor of Auschwitz and he created a one-man show to honor her. During the pandemic, Grunwald expanded this show into an educational program to teach younger generations about the Holocaust.
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(In September 2020, The Claims Conference released the results of a survey of Millennials and Gen Z from all 50 states about Holocaust knowledge. The survey found that 63% of those surveyed did not know that an estimated 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.)
After connecting with Grunwald, Alexander became “The Mitzvah Project’s” first teaching artist, taking the program to schools, institutions and organizations across the country.
The second person was Steve O’Neil, Vail Christian High School’s Head of School. O’Neil described their meeting as “serendipity.”
“He was my next-door neighbor, and we struck up a conversation one day shoveling snow in our driveways,” O’Neil said. “There was just a strong human connection.”
In Alexander’s words, “We became fast friends, really aligned spiritually, and we developed a fellowship and a brotherhood.”
As the two began to talk about Alexander’s work, and particularly his work with “The Mitzvah Project,” the opportunity for collaboration was evident. And so, Vail Christian High School became the first school where he performed “The Mitzvah Project” as a teaching artist in January 2023.
For O’Neil, the opportunity was an important one. O’Neil said that back when the Holocaust Museum opened in Washington, D.C., he was working as a Mandel fellow and was trained “in helping to foster Holocaust awareness in the state of Colorado, as well as addressing the seeds of anti-Semitism and prejudice and stereotyping,” and so, he’s seen anti-Semitism first hand.
In bringing the program to the school, O’Neil saw the opportunity to help raise students’ awareness and consciousness about the many issues discussed in “The Mitzvah Project.”
“Love is at the heart of the teachings of Jesus,” he said. “And I just saw ‘The Mitzvah Project’ as a great opportunity to have a high-level theatrical performance that would be captivatingly performed at Vail Christian. I also knew it would be a real privilege for our students to be able to experience that, but also that the conversations it would yield were the most important part.”
“The Mitzvah Project” is a three-part program. The first part is a one-person stage performance that follows the “interconnected lives of a Polish-Jewish Auschwitz survivor and a half-Jewish Wehrmacht officer who cross paths during the darkest days of the Holocaust,” according to the program’s site.
Alexander described the second portion as an educational lecture where the story’s scope is expanded to talk about discrimination, anti-Semitism and racism not just during the Holocaust, but also in America — historically and today
“We talk about where the Nazis derived the Nuremberg Laws, which were based on American race law — anti-miscegenation laws and Jim Crow laws,” he said. “I ask a couple of important questions in this lecture. Number one, and the most important being, why do we demonize the other? Why do we demonize someone else because of the color of their skin, their religion, how they identify, who they choose to love, what their cultural and ethnic background is?”
“Ultimately, the message is one of loving, kindness, peace and building connection instead of separation and embracing all people as our brothers and sisters because we’re all part of the same family,” he added.
Then, the final part of the program is a question and answer session.
“I open it up and I really encourage these young people to say what’s on their minds. And that’s, for me, the most important part of the program because I get to hear their stories, I get to do what I can to change how they’re perceived and how they perceive others. And so it’s really been transformative and become my life’s work.”
O’Neil said the program helped foster conversations between students and faculty about a lot of topics, including Elijah’s message about what happens “‘When we demonize the other,'” as O’Neil recalled.
“I think those are such powerful words. Given where we’re at in the United States with a lot of that occurring — demonizing and polarization — I just thought Elijah’s message was such a unifying message and a wake-up call to have the eyes to see the seeds that are insidious, that can really move towards even atrocities and violence and those types of things.”
The importance of education, advocacy
While Alexander’s continued work with “The Mitzvah Project” and his acting career has taken him all across the country in recent years, he’s continued to return to the Vail Valley. As he wrapped filming season four of “The Chosen,” running multiple “Mitzvah” programs and a run at the Utah Shakespeare Festival over this summer, he’s preparing to return for another season in Eagle County, including as an occasional substitute teacher at Vail Christian.
O’Neil, for his part, is grateful for Alexander’s work at the school. Not only does it help fill the need amid massive teacher and substitute teacher shortages, but Alexander himself brings a lot to the table.
“Elijah just brings Elijah’s personality to the table and obviously he’s going to balance accomplishing what the teacher would like to see accomplished, but he’s also going to find opportunities to engage with students,” O’Neil said. “And because he’s already built a reputation at our school and he’s such a kind and inclusive person. People really want to spend time with him and want to hear his story. I just would say there’s a lot of bonus features that happen in the classroom when he’s able to be here on campus.”
“I formed a real bond there with those students and with that community; it’s an amazing institution,” Alexander said.
“What I love about Vail Christian’s mission and their philosophy is they really put forward a sense of advocacy. They encourage their students to become advocates.”
This aligns well with the work he does and his personal philosophy around education, he said.
“There’s never been a more important time to educate young people about being advocates for the oppressed, those without a voice, those in need of support, help, guidance,” he said. “It’s my mission to educate young people about world history so they can be better informed and come from a place of understanding when they make decisions; to act with compassion, empathy and loving kindness.”
For Alexander, he feels that his life, work and experiences have “led me to this moment now.”
“What I can do is I can share that experience with these young people and offer them, as an example, one way of how I dealt with challenges, how I’ve dealt with discrimination and racism and anti-Semitism and being bullied and being aggressed. I’ve lived a lot of life, so I’m at the right time to be able to share my experience with these young people and to have an understanding of what they’re going through,” he said.
Through his work with “The Mitzvah Project” and with students, his goal is to “help them develop their authentic and articulate voice and to become better listeners, to be able to stand in their power and do it on purpose and be confident in their beliefs and be able to express those beliefs instead of keeping it in.”
Sharing this through a vehicle like theater and performance can be particularly empowering, Alexander added.
“Performing arts are, I think, the best tool for this because theater (and) storytelling teaches people how to empathize, how to have empathy and understanding and compassion for other people, and to celebrate differences as opposed to become prejudiced about them. It creates connection, it creates community, he said.
And as he hears from kids across the country and in Eagle County about their challenges today, Alexander has seen the importance and value of connection and community.
“When I was these students’ age, I didn’t know what I was doing either. And maybe that’s why I connect with them so deeply. I felt much of the same way in terms of feeling alone. I was trying to figure out where to get my support, where to belong, a community to belong to,” he said.
“And that’s what we’re all seeking: a sense of belonging, a sense of where we can make a contribution, a way to be useful, be part of something bigger than just ourselves and be supported in the things that we want to do.”
