Famous actor and director Mel Gibson and “The Chosen” actor Jonathan Roumie explained the importance of creating entertainment that communicates the message of Christianity to audiences. Gibson and Roumie have pioneered widely influential Christian entertainment with works such as “The Passion of the Christ” and “The Chosen” which share powerful, Christ-centered messages.
“There’s a tendency for all of us to take that event and the extent of the sacrifice for granted,” Gibson recently said during an interview with Greg Laurie. “In film, in particular, I think, [the crucifixion] has been sanitized a fair bit so that it becomes, I don’t know, ineffectual, not emotional.”
Gibson further emphasized his desire to accurately portray the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, allowing viewers to understand and genuinely appreciate the foundational moment in Christian history. “I wanted to illustrate the extent of the sacrifice Christ made, so I felt it was right to do a film like that. With my own experience contemplating over the years on The Passion, my imagination soared,” he said.
The “Passion of the Christ” director added, “And there are readings on the matter that kind of really brought home the dreadful reality of how bad it was. I just wanted to put that back on film to give people maybe a new look and to sort of bring another theological perspective to it that perhaps I hadn’t thought of before now.”
Jonathan Roumie, who portrays Jesus in the hit series “The Chosen” offered a similar sentiment as Gibson, explaining his motivation in illustrating the savior of humanity on screen. “I don’t know what it’s like to [be] the perfectly sinless Son of God — nobody does. I tend to stay out of the way when it comes to playing Jesus,” Roumie told Laurie. “But I do know what it’s like to be fully human, you know, fallible and all the ways humanity can be fallible and broken and weak.”
“So I use a lot of humanity in all these other roles, especially in a role like Lonnie Frisbee where he had such a wild and broken childhood,” Roumie said. “But God uses that. Despite his weaknesses, despite his trials that he went through to make him this beacon of hope, this dynamo of the Holy Spirit with the charisma of healing and touching people and reaching people’s hearts and knowing that Christ was looking for them.”
The Christian Tribune recently reported on other comments from Roumie who outlined the powerof th media. “That’s the power of media, that’s the power of the image, and when you have an image, I think with the Jesus of Nazareth, I really feel that Zeferelli was inspired by the Holy Spirit. I think it had such power to reach in,” Roumie said. “When you go to some of the religious bookshops and they have portraits of Jesus and it’s Robert Powell’s face, and even seeing images of my own face, to me is shocking and bizarre and I don’t know how anybody ever reconciles that, especially playing Jesus.”
Featured image credit: Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mel_Gibson_Cannes_2016_3.jpg