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Toni Rossi interviewed my good friend Jessica Rey on his blog, “The Intersection.”

Jes talks about her faith, speaking to kids about chastity, and the upcoming fashion show I’ve talked about previously on this blog.

Some snippits:

TR: Your recent focus has been on giving talks to young people about chastity and modesty. What made you start doing that?

Jessica Rey: I despise public speaking, and I know it’s so strange because I’m an actress. But there’s a difference. When you’re acting, it’s somebody else’s words and you’re playing another character. But when you give talks, it’s you yourself…so it is quite frightening. I didn’t want to do it. A lot of my priest friends kept asking me to do it, and I kept saying, “No, no.”

One day my friends went to this Christmas party and I was sick. At the Christmas party, they had these saint’s cards. They have them upside down and they pick one, and you’re supposed to pray to that saint for the rest of the year. I couldn’t go to the party so my friend said, “I’ll get you a card.” So she got me one, she gets home, and I say, “Who’d I get?” She looked at it and it was St. Bernardine of Siena – and I had no idea who that was at the time. I went and looked him up on the Internet and he’s the patron saint of public speaking (laughs). So I said, “Fine God, fine!” and I gave in and started doing it.

TR: Did those topics interest you throughout your life or did you learn about them the hard way by doing the opposite for a while?

Jessica Rey: I wasn’t doing the opposite to an extreme but I definitely didn’t understand fully chastity and definitely not modesty, especially having been in Hollywood for a while. I had a stylist who would dress me in these crazy outfits and I would walk down the red carpet thinking I was all that. I really wasn’t (laughs). So thankfully I learned about it fully before I really got into some bad stuff. But I grew up Catholic and always kind of knew. I just didn’t fully understand it. I learned about it from some people that I met in Hollywood. We actually had a group called “Holywood” and we would do a lot of formation, lots of different talks, Theology of the Body type stuff. So that’s how I fully learned about it.

TR: How do you make the concepts of chastity and modesty appealing to young people when you’ve got so many cultural forces promoting the opposite?

Jessica Rey: I think it’s really important that the people who give these talks are themselves younger and…they’re hipper and with the times. You know, (kids are) not really going to listen to it if it’s from their parents. Most kids don’t, sadly, so it does help that I’m younger, it helps that I’ve been on TV and kids think that’s really cool…And it’s crazy because I was just a Power Ranger (laughs)! I’m not an a-list celebrity that has been in a ton of blockbuster films. But they still think it’s cool that someone in Hollywood is living this life.

TR: So what should churches be doing better to reach out to young people?

Jessica Rey: My friends and I are actually starting – and I know that these exist throughout the country – but we’re going to be starting up some fashion shows here in Southern California. And the fashion show again is this cool thing that the girls want to be a part of. But it’s (also) going to be six weeks of formation on what it means to be a woman, how a man should treat you, we’re going to talk about courtship, modesty and dress, and just all of (those things) they’re not really getting.

Read the rest here.