Inside Diane Keaton’s Faith: What She Really Believes About Heaven and Hell

Diane Keaton has always been the type to say exactly what she thinks, even when the topic is something as loaded as faith. Which is why it still cracks me up (and kind of impresses me) that someone who openly shrugs at organized religion signed on to play a hardline Catholic nun. Here is how she explained that choice, and everything else that came with it.

How Keaton thinks about religion (and why that matters here)

In a 2001 chat with the Golden Globes, Keaton laid out her background in plain terms. Her dad was Irish Catholic, her mom was Methodist, and in the 1950s they took her to church. Then the 1960s happened, the family stepped away from religion entirely, and she felt that was the right move. She was raised with religion in the house, but not as a Catholic, and as an adult she does not buy the idea of hell at all. Eternal punishment, in her view, is absurd and not something anyone deserves. She also finds certain Catholic rules dense and hard to parse — she tossed out the fish-on-Fridays tradition as her go-to example.

Playing Sister Mary: a true stretch

When she took on the title role in Sister Mary Explains It All, Keaton said she had never actually spoken to nuns before. The part itself was a leap: Sister Mary is an authoritarian true believer whose worldview runs on rigid, fanatical certainty. That is not exactly a natural fit for someone who questions the very concept of hell.

• Title: Sister Mary Explains It All
• Release date: May 27, 2001
• Director: Marshall Brickman
• Rotten Tomatoes: 48%

The surprise connection: Keaton and the afterlife

This is the fun twist. Years before she put on the habit, Keaton wrote and directed a 1987 documentary called Heaven, which poked at what people believe happens after we die — heaven specifically. So even if she is not religious, she has been circling these questions for a long time.

Why she said yes anyway

Her reason for jumping at Sister Mary is wonderfully perverse for an actor: she thought she could not do it. In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, she put it this way:

"I saw it when it was in a workshop many years ago, and I just thought, I knew that that was a part that I could never do. And guess what? I was right."

She worried enough about the role that she hired two acting coaches. The movie itself took some heat — critics were rough on it, and there were even calls to boycott it — but fans singled out Keaton’s performance for praise. So the gamble paid off, at least for her.

The takeaway

Keaton does not practice, does not accept hell, and even finds certain church rules baffling — and still she chose to embody a character powered by uncompromising belief. It is a weird combination on paper, but that friction is exactly what makes her turn as Sister Mary interesting. Sometimes the roles you think you should avoid are the ones that end up showing off what you can actually do.