Famous actor in “The Chosen,” Jonathan Roumie, recently explained how it was ultimately God who prepared him to portray Jesus Christ in the hit series. Roumie, who took an interest in acting from a young age, explained how his life experiences shaped him to play his biggest role.
Growing up as a Christian, Roumie was inspired by faith-based entertainment, such as Franco Zerelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth,” where he was even compelled to reenact the crucifixion in his backyard as a young child. The actor explained the power of media and how it shapes perception.
“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 recounted “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.”
However, as Roumie pursued a career in acting, he soon realized that his prospects were dim as he could only land smaller roles. Eventually, Roumie committed his life to God and trusted where He would lead his acting career.
“I was at the lowest point in my life without any glimmer of hope or aspirations of change,” Roumie said in a recent social media post, recalling the period where he gave it all to God. “All I would do in this moment was submit to Jesus my existence and my purpose. By the grace, mercy, and mystery of God, through an act of complete surrender, my life would be changed forever, mere hours later.”
“Everything was in God’s hands, with no guarantees. And we were all OK with that,” Roumie said on Instagram. “It’s still astonishing to see how far we’ve come in that time, but an undoubted testament to the power of submission to the Lord and how much further He will take you if you let Him into your life, and specifically, your trials.”
The Christian Tribune reported on other comments from Roumie in which he described how it feels to play the role of Jesus Christ. “If I show up at a conference and then I have met a bunch of people that pour their heart out to me and tell me, like, what’s been going on in their lives and how my work has affected them, it just sort of puts me into a different mode where all of a sudden I think my brain has to just shut down or just kind of portion away moments,” he said.
“It’s made me want to be more like him in my day to day. You know, the more time you spend with him, the more unavoidable it is that he’s going to have an effect on your heart, no matter who you are, where you’ve come from, and even if you’re already believer, like I was going into these projects, it just, it just deepens exponentially your wish to kind of know him on, on a much more spiritually fundamental level, emotionally fundamental level, physically fundamental level,” he said in other comments.
Featured image credit: 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