Actor David Henrie says he will not take roles requiring nudity, sex scenes or kissing, drawing the line at anything he believes would betray his marriage.
“For me, I draw the line if it’s anything that would actually violate our relationship as a married couple,” Henrie told Matt and Abby Howard on “The Unplanned Podcast” Tuesday. The 37-year-old “Wizards of Waverly Place” alum appeared on the show with his wife, Maria Cahill, whom he married in 2017.
Henrie specifically named nudity as off-limits. Cahill, laughing, put it more bluntly: “He’s not kissing anybody.”
“I feel like he cares more than I care. I so trust him, I literally don’t care. He’s like, ‘I will not kiss [someone else],'” Cahill said.
Henrie explained his standard: he’ll take a role as long as it doesn’t conflict with his conscience, and he separates fictional violence from physical intimacy on screen.
“If I have to kill someone, like, I’m not really killing someone, you know? You can fake that,” Henrie said. “[With intimate scenes] you’re not faking that… You’re really doing that thing… You’re in bed making out… I don’t care how much you’re thinking of bees and birds, or whatever you’re doing to distract yourself. You’re really doing that.”
He said performing those scenes would “feel weird” and repeated flatly, “I’m not going to do it.”
The subject came up because of Henrie’s Disney Channel days playing Justin Russo on “Wizards of Waverly Place,” where he kissed his character’s love interest years before he married Cahill. The couple’s four children watched the episode and were not pleased.
“They were like, ‘You have another wife?’ Like, they were so upset,” Cahill laughed. “They’ll randomly bring it up, like, ‘Papa kissed another woman,'” Henrie added. “And they’ll go up to her and be like, ‘Papa has a girlfriend.’ It’s so funny.”
Henrie, a devout Catholic, has spoken before about what his faith has cost him in Hollywood. Earlier this year on the “Bryce Crawford Podcast,” he described losing his agents and much of his social circle after refusing roles he saw as disrespecting his beliefs.
“It was rough, lost my agents,” he said. “I walked away from a lot. I turned down a lot of roles. I was like I’m just not going to do something that I think will disrespect my belief now or disrespect our Lord. I’m just not going to do it. I’m not going to go near it. And it cost me a lot. It cost a lot. I lost a lot of money. Friends, a girlfriend at the time. I kind of was stripped of everyone, everyone that I would call a friend.”
Henrie said the friends he made afterward challenged him in new ways — and that path eventually led him to Cahill.
