Mel Gibson warned Jim Caviezel when they first discussed “The Passion of the Christ” that if he took the role of Jesus it could ruin his career, the 56-year-old actor said this week.
Caviezel said he originally met with Gibson’s producer about doing a surfer movie, but “the script wasn’t there yet.”
About 40 minutes into the meeting with Steve McEveety, Gibson showed up.
“We were talking about surfing movies and everything, and then it pivots into Christ movies, you know, Jesus movies. Well, that’s not a surfing movie. It’s not Jesus on a surfboard. How’s that going to work?” Caviezel told Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo on his “Arroyo Grande” podcast on Wednesday.
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Jim Caviezel portrayed Jesus Christ in 2004’s “The Passion of the Christ.” (Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection)
Caviezel said he remembered back to when he was 19 years old, and he believed the voice of God spoke to him and told him to be an actor.
“I went, ‘Oh my God,’ I mean, I’m not blaspheming God, I’m not taking his name in vain,” he said about the meeting with Gibson. “I literally said, ‘Oh my God, this is it,’ and I said, ‘You want me to play Jesus, don’t you?”
He said Gibson almost swallowed the cigarette he was smoking, and he choked out, “Yeah.”
“And I said, ‘OK, I’m in,’ and because of the movie theater [incident], I said, ‘I’m supposed to do this. I don’t need anybody to tell me to do this.’”
Gibson called him two days later to warn him.
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Jim Caviezel starred in 2004’s “The Passion of the Christ.” (Newmarket/courtesy Everett Collection)
“He goes, ‘You really want to do this?’ He goes, ‘If you do this movie, you may never work in this town again,’ and I went, ‘What?’”
“He goes, ‘You really want to do this?’ He goes, ‘If you do this movie, you may never work in this town again,’ and I went, ‘What?’”
Caviezel said, “What I wanted to make was what really happened, so I was OK with that.”
While making the film, Caviezel said he went to confession every day to “keep my temple as pure as I can so that he could come through me.”
He also went through severe physical anguish while working on the movie, which included contracting double pneumonia, hypothermia, separating his shoulder and being struck by lightning while on the cross.
“The pain was excruciating,” he said of his time on the cross, adding that in the last shot in the movie, “I got ripped right in half from that lightning bolt.”
He said he also had atrial fibrillation while he was on the cross and that a set doctor turned to Gibson after listening to his heart through a stethoscope and said, “He could die.”
Caviezel said he had atrial fibrillation while he was on the cross and that a set doctor turned to Gibson after listening to his heart through a stethoscope and said, “He could die.” (D Dipasupil/Getty Images)
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After the shoot, Caviezel underwent two heart surgeries that he said stemmed from all that he went through in the movie.
The cross was rigged with a bike seat that he could sit on during the shoot, and Caviezel said he was so exhausted that he would sleep while up there.
“I couldn’t stay awake,” he said of the exhausting shoot.
He even slept in his makeup that took around eight hours to put on.
“It was constant torment,” he said, adding that he felt that brought him closer to the suffering of Jesus.
Mel Gibson accepts a Critics’ Choice Award for “The Passion of the Christ” in 2005. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
By the time they got to the crucifixion scenes, he said he wasn’t sure he could pull it off because of his shoulder separation.
“It forced me into the arms of my God because I had nowhere else to go,” he told Arroyo.
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But he said once he realized how much God “loves me, I wanted to do it for him.”
A sign posted in a New York City movie theater in 2004 shows all the showtimes were sold out. (Stephen Chernin/Getty Images)
“It was OK though, because it was part of the purpose of why I was born,” he added.
He added, “The films that we make are controlling the world’s narrative, and the world didn’t like this film, and that’s a good thing, so we did a good job.”
Caviezel is preparing to play Jesus once again in “The Resurrection of the Christ,” and while he’s “scared” to take on the role again, he said he knows he wouldn’t be ready if there wasn’t some fear.
Gibson invested tens of millions of his own money into 2004’s “The Passion of the Christ,” and the film was a huge success, grossing more than $600 million worldwide.
It is the highest-grossing religious film at the global box office, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
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“The Resurrection of the Christ” is expected to be released in 2026.
