Jim Caviezel on the set of The Passion of the Christ with director Mel Gibson. Photo: Reuters
You play the Herculean lead in a passionate $30 million project led by one of Hollywood's biggest names that is a year-round runaway success story, grossing over $600 million worldwide. It is the role of a lifetime—physically exhausting, emotionally draining. Your game enjoys almost universal recognition.
Some kind of reward. You were struck by lightning while you were doing this. During the whipping scene, someone misses and you literally get whipped. You dislocate your shoulder on the way to your own crucifixion, and then hang almost naked in sub-zero temperatures for days, which means you have pneumonia and a lung infection.
If you are Leonardo DiCaprio, in any other role you will probably get an Oscar for all this. But if you're Jim Caviezel and the movie is Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004), then the normal part of your career—when Hollywood was ready to roll out the red carpet—ends startlingly abruptly. However, Caviezel is now a box office gold medalist thanks to Sounds of Freedom, a religious thriller about child trafficking that just hit theaters in the US and grossed $14.2 million to everyone's surprise.
Few actors' trajectories in the past 30 years have taken a more idiosyncratic shape. Caviezel's first screen recognition as an airline clerk was in Gus Van Sant's gay love novel My Own Private Idaho (1991), when he was a 23-year-old acting student from Mount Vernon, Washington, near Seattle. He played Kevin Costner's younger brother in Wyatt Earp (1994), turning down a Juilliard scholarship to do so, and was one of the Joes alongside Demi Moore in Ridley Scott's Soldiers. Jane (1997).
But the high point—one of American cinema's magical casting feats—came when Terrence Malick pulled Caviezel out of obscurity to play the protagonist, Private Whitt, in his deeply spiritual Guadalcanal epic The Thin Red Line (1998). The character, a rebellious angel who wants to be AWARDED in heaven, must ascend to a plane of existence that no one can touch while all hell breaks loose. Not your daily task. Trying to guess the name of the actors vying to play Witt could take us hours, and I can't think of a single one who didn't mess it up. Caviezel is great in this role, irreplaceable, and that's a huge part of why the film is so special.
After this dazzling turnaround, the next five years were his oyster. He played Dennis Quaid's inconsolable son in Frequency (2000), Jennifer Lopez's soul mate in Angel Eyes (2001), and domineering Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo (2002). It all led to Passion, the part that Gibson warned him could close more doors than open. «He said, 'You will never work in this city again,'» Caviezel told a church audience in 2011. — I said: “We all must take up our cross.”
The role of Christ, in itself, is hardly a killer for the career that Gibson offers. (That didn't stop Max von Sydow, Willem Dafoe, Robert Powell, or Joaquin Phoenix much.) But the intensity of this film's faith-based ambition—and Caviezel's necessary commitment to it—set it apart from everyone else in the eyes of the film industry. care. In fact, Gibson was right at once.
Caviezel fell victim to Passion's success, losing decent lead roles almost immediately. Instead, he was offered villains, such as the uptight patriot opposite Denzel Washington in Deja Vu (2006), and other oddball roles, such as an alien warrior in the sci-fi B-movie Outlander (2008). Perhaps his most notable post-Christian role was on television as a former CIA operative who was thought to be dead on the CBS concept crime series The Suspect, which ran from 2011 to 2016. He also played St. Luke in the 2018 drama Paul, Apostle of Christ, which helped the film achieve moderate success with Christian audiences and gross $26 million worldwide.
Jim Caviezel and Jennifer Lopez in Angel Eyes
The actor's ultra-conservative beliefs have recently become more widely publicized, which sheds light on what roles he was ready to play over the past 20 years and who was ready to take him. He is a devout and outspoken Catholic who opposes abortion (which makes him exceptional in Hollywood) and disapproves of sexual nudity on screen — ironic, given how little he is dressed as a manly martyr in his two most famous roles. He refused to strip in Angel Eyes or film a love scene with Ashley Judd in Crimes Special (2002) out of respect for his wife.
So far so vanilla. But he also links liberal values to Satanism and supports the blood-collection conspiracy theory that QAnon followers say is being perpetrated against children by the «Hollywood elite.» He mentioned this at the 2021 Anti-Vaccination Gathering called the «Health Freedom Summit» when he mentioned «adrenochromization in children» in a conversation.
The theory suggests that children are kidnapped and tortured to death so that psychedelic drugs can be extracted from their adrenal glands. You can trace this belief back centuries, all the way back to the anti-Semitic “blood libel” motif that actually reared its ugly head in The Passion of the Christ, an Aramaic line that Gibson stubbornly kept in his books. final version (only English subtitles removed).
Jim Caviezel meeting with Pope John Paul II in the Vatican in 2004. hotspot
Such references are the infamous dog whistles of QAnon's army of followers, which explains Caviezel's current comeback from the dead at the US box office. His new action movie The Sound of Freedom opened in America on July 4 and outsold Indiana Jones and the Disc of Destiny (which opened rather weakly last Friday) in one day. At the time of writing, Indy managed $159 million worldwide; The Sound of Freedom $18.3 million. Will not catch up. But David's one-day victory over Goliath, carefully planned by distributor Angel Studios, certainly makes for a good story.
In the film, Caviezel found a role — even bigger than Christ — that most closely matches his current worldview. He plays a real-life character named Tim Ballard, a former security officer turned vigilante on a mission to save children from sex traffickers in Colombia. The adrenal glands are not specifically mentioned, but the whole premise is at least not uploaded by QA and the target audience is very clear.
Perhaps most bizarre, the movie was made back in 2018 and bought by Fox, but then shelved after the Disney merger — the same Disney that released Indiana Jones. Angel Studios has been fighting all this time to get the rights back using crowdfunding. Mel Gibson approved it in the video.
Caviezel himself recently filmed a three-minute «Special Message» that plays over the end credits, claiming that «every obstacle you can imagine» was thrown at the film to try and prevent it from coming out. When a QR code appears on the screen, it encourages viewers to «pay up front» for their experience by buying extra tickets for those who haven't seen it yet. If you do not agree, you are likely supporting child sex trafficking. He finishes by pointing his finger at the camera, on the verge of tears. «Just remember: God's children are not for sale.»
Once you become such a mouthpiece, the possibility of a «normal» Hollywood career, to put it bluntly, will disappear. Instead, there are rumors that Gibson and Caviezel are reuniting for a sequel to The Passion of the Christ — maybe even two sequels. According to some reports, production has already begun, with a release date set for next year's Easter, and the focus will be on the three days between Christ's death and resurrection.
«It's like an acid trip,» Gibson said. «You're in hell and watching angels fall.» Caviezel, who will once again play Christ digitally, told Breitbart News that it will be «the biggest film in the history of the world.» After that, a reunion with J.Lo in a taste-cleansing musical romantic comedy is unlikely.
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