NY Times Interview: Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus To Millions. It Can Get Intense.

New York Times, The Interview: Jonathan Roumie Plays Jesus to Millions. It Can Get Intense.:

It’s common, maybe even natural, for audiences to conflate actors with the roles they play. To assume, for example, that an onscreen action hero is tough offscreen too, or that a rom-com star is a real-life charmer. That blurring of lines is probably a sign that an actor is doing something right, but it doesn’t make the dynamic any less strange or confusing. Especially if the character you’re famous for playing is Jesus Christ.

Since 2017, Jonathan Roumie has starred as Jesus on “The Chosen,” a hit series that takes a prestige-TV approach to the story told in the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Neither piously solemn nor portentously heavy-handed, “The Chosen,” which was created by Dallas Jenkins (son of the author Jerry Jenkins, a co-writer of the hugely popular “Left Behind” books), instead displays snappy dialogue, tense interpersonal drama, unexpected humor and high production values.

That slickly modern style, which allows the show to appeal to a curious nonbeliever like me, is centered on Roumie’s warm and relatable portrayal, and it has helped the show become a gigantic success. To date, “The Chosen,” which is available for streaming on Amazon, Hulu and other platforms and will return for its fifth season next year, has been watched by more than 250 million people.

All that positive attention has nudged Roumie, a Catholic, toward being a kind of faith leader. At public events for “The Chosen,” he can be swamped by fans looking to, as it were, touch the hem of his garment; he gets asked to deliver high-profile speeches at faith-based events attended by thousands; and in the online world, he has a partnership with the prayer app Hallow, where subscribers can hear him read scripture and lead meditative reflections. It’s safe to say these opportunities were not on his radar before playing the son of God.

Roumie, who is 50 and was struggling in his career before landing “The Chosen,” is well aware that he’s in an emotionally and psychologically complicated situation for an actor. But it’s also a situation that — he believes, anyway — is all part of a greater plan. …

How does it happen that a struggle-bussing actor makes it big playing Jesus? I think that the path to that is absolute surrender to a higher power. Because that’s what it took for me to get to the place where I was ready for an opportunity like this. I had moved to L.A., and I struggled for eight years. I was trying so hard to control my life, to control my destiny, to do the things that I thought needed to be done to have a successful career as an actor, and they weren’t working. I was on government assistance. That ran out. I woke up completely broke one morning. I didn’t see any way out. So I literally said: “God, you take this from me. It’s in your hands now. I’m not going to worry about it.” Then, three months later, “The Chosen” comes along. I thought, OK, I just needed to submit. …

When I watch videos of you giving talks, you come out to a wave of applause — an overwhelming response. That sort of attention, combined with getting it for playing Jesus, strikes me as a potentially psychologically and spiritually combustible situation. Does it feel that way to you? No. I recognize that none of this is about me. I don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. …

The thing that I don’t understand is how you separate the idea that, as you said, you’re nothing, you don’t matter — Dust in the wind.

But then you also feel as if you’ve been put here for a reason. Those seem like contradictory ideas. How do you reconcile them? I guess it is kind of hard to make that distinction. Yes, there’s a sense of mission, but the mission is about Jesus. …

There’s a way in which experiences like that call to mind a kind of category error. Because you play Jesus, you are put into positions that probably an actor shouldn’t be put into. Is there a part of you that thinks, This is messed up? I mean, the category-error thing is kind of funny, because all of us are not the sum total of what we do. I think you, by what you do as an interviewer and the questions that you ask and the things that you bring out of people, shed light on humanity in ways that other people wouldn’t know how to do. So in many ways, you have a gift for humanity that you might not even be considering in that light. You know what I mean?

Oh, I 100 percent agree with everything you just said! [Laughs.] No, but it’s absolutely true, because I don’t think we’re meant to be here to just eke out a living and get a job and maybe have a family, make some money and then die. Like, we have a conversation, and some sort of fruit comes out of that for somebody else hearing this interview, and all of a sudden the trajectory that they were on changes. They learn something about Christians or Catholics or non-Christians, and they have a better dialogue. That’s part of what we’re all here to do. …

You talked earlier about the idea of surrendering to God. I think that for nonbelievers, the idea of surrender can sound like a cliché, like when an athlete talks about “taking it one game at a time” or “giving 110 percent.” Can you explain more concretely about what it actually looked like for you to surrender? I think the simplest way to describe it is arriving at the position of where I recognize that my ability to control my destiny, my fate, my path, ultimately is beyond me. Yet I have to participate in the process of moving forward, of achievement, of trying to follow the direction that I believe I’m meant to go. When I came to that moment of surrender, I came to the conclusion that God had a plan for me. It’s like he said: “OK, I’ve given you these gifts, I’ve given you these talents, do something with them.” And I’m kind of like, “OK, let me go do something with them!” For me, it was in a moment of severe stress and anxiety and borderline fiscal destitution that I basically said, “I can’t do it on my own.” It was essentially a prayer where I said: “I want whatever you want for me because you know better than I do what’s good for me. Whatever that is, show me what it is.”

Are there ways in which your faith is still being tested? Constantly.

Give me the nitty-gritty. Where are you being tested? They asked St. Paul about that, and he never quite answered directly. He had a prayer. He’s like, “Lord, take this thorn from my side.” “Three times,” he said, “I asked the Lord to take this thorn from my side, and God said, ‘No, I’m not going to take that from you, because my grace is sufficient.’” In other words, he needed Paul to have this thing, this weakness, so that Paul would always depend on God. I’m not comparing myself to Paul in any aspect whatsoever, but we all deal with something. I’m a woefully flawed human being, but I’m trying to do the best that I can with the gifts that I’ve been given. And me even just walking the walk of faith publicly — it’s not something that I ever intended to do. It’s something that, during the pandemic, I felt pushed to do. I started praying live on my social media accounts. I thought, This is a career killer. Because it would out me as a Christian and then even more stringently out me as a Catholic Christian, which people find even harder to take.