Famous actor Jonathan Roumie recently gave an interview to author Jennie Allen in which he discussed playing the role of Jesus Christ in the hit show The Chosen. Roumie explained how his depiction of Christ has brought out a range of emotions in those who encounter him.
“Some people will literally just start crying. Other people will ask me to pray for them,” Roumie noted. “I’ve had people who’ve been suffering with depression, who had brain cancer ask me to lay hands on them, pray for them.”
Roumie discussed one of the most powerful encounters he had when a woman introduced him to her son with cerebral palsy. She told him that her son’s favorite episode of “The Chosen” was when Jesus healed a paralyzed man.
The actor said, “This was one of the most emotionally overwhelming experiences I had. I appeared at a conference with a pastor to an arena full of people, and afterward, as I was leaving, I met this woman who had her son with her, and he was suffering from cerebral palsy. And he was in a wheelchair, and he couldn’t talk. He could just kind of make sounds but he couldn’t talk, and he couldn’t, you know, obviously walk or anything like that.”
According to Roumie, the woman said, “Wouldn’t it be great if God did that for my son?” He said, “I’m like thinking like, ‘Oh, I don’t — as far as I know, I don’t have that power, right? That gift. But I’d be happy to pray with your son. Would that be okay?’”
The actor left the encounter feeling emotional wishing he could have done something to help her son, illustrating how no man can measure to the greatness of Jesus Christ and the miracles he performed during his ministry. “I left, and I burst into tears because I thought there, on some level, I must have let her down. Like, in the back of her mind, she may have been just hoping, like maybe there’s a chance, and trying to live up to that is impossible,” he said. “It’s just not possible.”
When asked by Allen to describe this apparent burden of depicting the savior of mankind, since the show could be introducing Jesus Christ to so many viewers for the first time in their lives, he noted that the Holy Spirit can use any tools necessary to spread his Gospel.
“I think it’s a privilege, but I was so affected by media that I had watched this miniseries called Jesus of Nazareth, one of my favorites, and I mean, that’s the power of media. And so when I see people reacting the way they do, I know that the Holy Spirit can use whatever he wants to to reach people and to draw people closer to God,” Roumie stated.
The actor further described the show’s power in that it can deepen a real relationship with Christ instead of when people engage with fictional entertainment. Roumie said, “Because of the deepening of that relationship with Jesus that they already have, which inevitably [is] the most intimate and important relationship that a person could have. Or it’s introducing them to this person of Jesus that is making them question what they knew or what they thought they knew about him and compelling them to get to know him if they don’t know him. So being the face of that encounter, of that experience all of a sudden transforms them when they’re met with me in a store.”
Featured image credit: Movieguide®, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jonathan_Roumie.jpg