Jonathan Roumie: The Weight of Playing Jesus in The Chosen, & How to Raise Your Spiritual Awareness
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You're an actor. You're looking for work. You're agent or somebody calls you and says, we'd like you to play Jesus. What's that like?
It was an answered prayer. The person who made that call was a friend and a colleague by that point, a guy by the name of Dallas Jenkins, who created The Chosen. And I had played Jesus for him for his church's Good Friday service. in these little vignettes three times over the course of four years between 2014 and 2017. Just literally in a church. In a church. So we'd go and shoot out on a farm, these vignettes, whatever built sets into this. And his church has like a little studio. And so we would... But mostly on location, we would film these little films that would be in the spirit of Good Friday or illustrate a particular gospel passage or scripture scene. And that was in line with the theme of the service for that year.
And yeah, so the first time I played Jesus in one of those short films was The Crucifixion. I was in it for five minutes. The film itself, it's called The Two Thieves. You can actually find it, I think, on Amazon still. And it was about... It was a what-if story about the two thieves crucified on either side of Christ. Like, who were they? How did they get there? How do you go in like one of the Gospels, in one paragraph from, you know, he was being mocked and reviled even by the thieves next to him to all of a sudden... The penitent thief, as he's referred to, gives his life basically to Jesus in that moment and says, Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus says, truly, today you will be with me in paradise.
And he basically, it's like the first confession on the cross. And he grants him access to the kingdom. And so how does that, how do you go from... being one of the mockers, revilers to this sudden conversion on the cross. And so Dallas tries to answer that question in the course of this 25-minute film. I actually read for The Penitent Thief because he's got this fantastic narrative arc. And I thought I'd had a great audition. It was in L.A. at the time. And I knew it was an opportunity to get paid a nominal stipend for some work in another city, in this case, suburban Chicago. And I thought, man, I would audition for this short film. I don't care if it's for a church. It's a great story. The script is great. So I go and I audition. I had a great audition.
I'm like, I think I nailed it. A couple of days later, I get a call back to come back in, but this time to read for Jesus. And I thought to myself, ah, man, I didn't get the first role. And then I looked again at the script. I'm like, Jesus got like five lines in the whole thing. But I had happened to have played Jesus six months prior for another completely independent project up in Washington State at a studio for this Catholic company called St. Luke Productions about this saint in the early 20th century named St. Faustina. who was considered a mystic. She had these visions. She wrote an entire diary that was sort of dictated to her by Christ himself in these visions. And so I played Jesus in the vision aspect of that story for this traveling one-woman show where it was an actress playing the saint, a screen behind her, a couple of rudimentary set pieces. And then all of the other characters in the show, in the play, including these visions of Jesus, was projected on a screen that she would choreographically time out her scenes with for 90 minutes.
So fast forward six months later, I get to audition for the two thieves. I didn't get the penitent thief. I go and I audition for Jesus because I'm like, you know what? I enjoyed playing Jesus six months ago. Like this would be cool if I got, if I got anything, it'd be cool because I wasn't working steadily or consistently. And the way Dallas tells the story about 10 seconds into the audition, he's like, that's Jesus. That's my Jesus for this show. And so we did that film and it was screened. He brought me back to view it like a month later at the Good Friday service with his church, about seven services. It was like 15,000 people saw this thing in a matter of a day and a half. And it was remarkably well received.
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