If Jim Caviezel is to be believed, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a jobbing actor to play Jesus and continue to eat lunch in Hollywood. Caviezel, so far as most filmgoers are concerned, was last seen being laboriously flayed and nailed in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Since then, he claims, he's been "rejected by my industry" and exiled to such little-seen pictures as Outlander that is billed, rather poignantly, as an SF thriller in which a space alien eats up some 8th-century Vikings. It's hard not to see a film like Outlander as an actor's own personal Golgotha.
Speaking at the First Baptist Church of Orlando last week, Caviezel said all this was foretold to him, way back in the beginning. "You'll never work in this town again," Gibson reportedly warned him as they prepared to shoot their movie. "We all have to embrace our crosses," he reportedly shot back. So he knew what he was getting into. "We have to give up our names, our reputations, our lives to speak the truth," Caviezel told the Orlando congregation. This, he implied, is simply the way men such as he and Gibson have chosen to live their lives, telling the truth, regardless of the consequences, whether embarking on a blood-and-thunder reading of the gospels, rowing with the girlfriend, or engaging in some drunken banter with traffic cops on the Pacific Coast Highway.
On the face of it, perhaps, Caviezel has some cause for complaint. Prior to his turn as Christ, he was a rising star; a pleasingly wonky, intense presence in such films as The Thin Red Line, Frequency and the (otherwise risible) Angel Eyes. Afterwards he was humbled, brought low and reduced to battling space aliens in 8th-century Norway. But why might this be so? It's not that Caviezel (at least on the evidence I've seen) is a bad actor, or even that The Passion of the Christ (for all its lingering stench of anti-semitism) flopped at the box office. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Is Caviezel suggesting that playing Jesus killed his career? If so, I don't think the evidence bears him out. A star turn as the saviour never did Willem Dafoe (The Last Temptation of Christ), Max von Sydow (The Greatest Story Ever Told) or Jeffrey Hunter (King of Kings) any harm. Even John Turturro, who elected to play "Jesus" as a preening, foul-mouthed pederast, appears to have emerged from the experience relatively unscathed.
Maybe Caviezel is implying that his Jesus was somehow different from those other impostors. So holy, so exalted, so definitively Jesus that the world can never again accept him as anyone other than the son of God. That's quite a claim. Can it be that God loved the world so greatly that he gave it his only son in the guise of a Hollywood movie star? Or – heaven forbid – are there some more mundane factors at work here?
