Director and Actor Corbin Bernsen’s New Movie on Christians and Dating

In Christian Mingle, Gwyneth Hayden is a 30-Something marketing executive who seems like she has the perfect life. She’s got a great career, wonderful friends, and she makes lots of money. However, as she sees the years passing by, she becomes more and more desperate to meet someone and fall in love. She sees a commercial for the Christian Mingle dating website and fills out a profile even though she isn’t a Christian. She meets a great guy through the site and poses as a Believer to win him over. Her lies eventually catch up with her when he finds out she is lying.  When her façade crumbles, she is left to face her superficial life for what it really is, and she is driven to seek a personal relationship with God.  Corbin says, “God has a plan that is as unique as a snowflake- that’s what Christian Mingle is about.  We are all snow and we’re all flakes, but we’re each individual. We are humanity and our paths to God, light, and enlightenment are unique.”

The film became available via DVD on January 13, 2015.

Corbin dedicated his previous movie, Beyond the Heavens, to honor his mother, legendary soap star Jeanne Cooper who passed away on May 8, 2013.  Beyond the Heavens has a special meaning for him because it tells the story of a mother and son. It some ways it depicts how Corbin’s mother encouraged him to seek the truth. The movie was released on her birthday, Oct 25. 

THE FAITH JOURNEY

Corbin burst into national prominence on the show, LA Law in the late 1980s-90s.  His actress mother Jeanne Cooper was a popular legend on The Young & the Restless.   The death of his father five years ago set Corbin on a faith journey which made him ask serious life questions.  He says many of the themes in his films are a direct reflection of the environment he was raised in, “specifically by my mother.”   She taught him to always explore, be open to that which seems impossible because all is possible!  The confidence to live one’s life that way, she said, was based on the idea that we layer it all on a bedrock of absolute faith in God, a recognition of His grace, and a thankfulness for His gift – the gift of life itself.  This became very real to him over the years as he watched his Mom struggle with personal demons, questioning God, challenging him.  These lessons were for the real world where there was human suffering.  “To the end, through it all, she never gave up on God or her faith.  She overcame every wave that threatened to sink her by making her way into

God’s lifeboat love,” he says.  He didn’t know when he began writing and shooting Beyond the Heavens, that just two years later, his mother would be gone.  When she died this year he was flooded with all the obvious emotions.  But among them he was reminded of her love and life lessons that he has employed along the way.  He wanted to share something special about this bond and did it the only way he knew how to, and that was to tell a story through film.  His filmmaking journey is to bring up these issues of life questions, so people will be willing to bring Christ into their situation. 

JESSIE AND NAOMI

Corbin is working on new film in conjunction with Dr. Mitch Land and Regent University. He is overseeing 66 students who “get a chance to work on a “real film with real deadlines.” The working title of the movie is Jessie and Naomi, a romantic comedy about a young woman on the path to find God and love. Corbin says he doesn’t want his films to be “preachy.” Instead, he encourages people to “listen to their hearts, be true, and listen to the light inside of each of us. People’s hearts are seeking and we need to meet them where they are.”