Portraying Jesus
By Holly McClure

To portray the most famous man who ever lived requires a confident, controlled actor who can radiate mercy, love and forgiveness without opening his mouth. Actor Jim Caviezel recalls that when Mel Gibson offered him the part of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, he said to him, “Do you realize I’m 33 years old, the same age Jesus was when he went through all of this?” He believes his performance is divinely inspired.

“Truthfully, it was never up to me,” he told me on the set of The Passion in Italy. “I’m interested in letting God work through me to play this role. I believe the Holy Spirit has been leading me in the right direction and to get away from my own physical flesh and allow the character of Jesus to be played out the way God wants it — that’s all I can do.”

The devoutly Catholic Caviezel takes his role seriously, often praying and softly quoting Scripture while in character. But he has a lighter side (he does a dead-on imitation of Bing Crosby), as well as a stoic one.

“I endured freezing winds that almost blew my cross off the cliff while I was on it,” he says. “I felt it sway back and forth and I knew it was going to blow over.”

Shooting in these conditions went on for a couple of weeks. “To make matters worse,” he continues, “we were there without a heater and, of course, I don’t have many clothes on the cross, so my body was going numb. I was spit on and beaten and carried my cross for days over and over the same road — it was brutal.”

He had a 2 a.m. call time every morning to get skin put on for the flagellation and crucifixion scenes. Not only did Caviezel spend 15 days on the cross, he endured days in ropes and chains, being scourged and whipped.

“Mel likes to put violence in his movies,” the actor says, “but all he cares about is making it look true to the text. Never before has a film of our Lord been shown like this one. By the time [audiences] get to the crucifixion scene, I believe there will be many who can’t take it and will have to walk out — I guarantee it. And I believe there will be many who will stay and be drawn to the truth.”

Gibson accepts that making a movie about Jesus is risky “because it’s very personal for everyone. Every nation and creed has been influenced by Christ in some way or another, and everyone has differing opinions about who he is, what he is and why, or whether they even believe in him or not. And that’s the point of my film, really: to show all that turmoil around him politically because he is who he is.”

Holly McClure is a multimedia personality who co-hosts a weekly program on LeSEA Broadcast, and is a producer and entertainment host for a new show called “180.”

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