![]() ![]() He refused to take his clothes off in Angel Eyes, or to film a love scene opposite Ashley Judd in High Crimes (2002), out of respect for his wife. He’s a devout and outspoken Catholic, who opposes abortion (making him an outlier in Hollywood) and disapproves of screen nudity in sexual contexts – ironically, given how little he wears as a masculine martyr in his two most celebrated roles. The actor’s ultra-conservative beliefs have lately become more widely publicised, which shines a backward light on which roles he’s been willing to take in the last 20 years, and who’s been willing to cast him. He also played Saint Luke in the 2018 drama Paul, Apostle of Christ, helping the film to moderate success with Christian audiences, and a global gross of $26 million. Easily his most prominent post-Christ role as been on TV, as an ex-CIA operative who’s assumed dead, in the high-concept CBS crime series Person of Interest, which ran from 2011-2016. ![]() Instead, he was offered villains, such as the disturbed patriot opposite Denzel Washington in Déjà Vu (2006), and other weird jobs, such as the alien warrior in the sci-fi B-movie Outlander (2008). In fact, Gibson was immediately proved correct.Ĭaviezel was a victim of Passion’s success, blackballed from respectable leading roles almost instantly. (It didn’t hinder Max von Sydow, Willem Dafoe, Robert Powell or Joaquin Phoenix that much.) But the intensity of that film’s faith-based ambitions – and Caviezel’s necessary commitment to it – set it apart in the industry’s eyes from every other treatment. The role of Christ, per se, is hardly the career-killer Gibson suggests. “I said, ‘We all have to embrace our crosses’.” “He said, ‘You’ll never work in this town again’,” Caviezel told a church audience in 2011. It was all leading up to Passion – a part which even Gibson warned him might close far more doors than it opened. He got to be Dennis Quaid’s disconsolate son in Frequency (2000), Jennifer Lopez’s soulmate in Angel Eyes (2001), and a commanding Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo (2002). Caviezel is heavenly in the role, irreplaceable, and a huge part of why the film’s so special.Īfter that dazzling coup, the next five years were his oyster. Trying to guess the name actors jostling to play Witt could take us hours, and I can’t think of a single one who wouldn’t have ruined it. The character, a rebel angel who wants to be AWOL in Paradise, has to ascend to a plane of existence no one else can touch, while all hell is breaking loose. Jane (1997).īut the star-making moment – one of the magical casting feats of American cinema – arrived when Terrence Malick plucked Caviezel from obscurity to play the main character, Private Witt, in his intensely spiritual Guadalcanal epic The Thin Red Line (1998). He played Kevin Costner’s youngest brother in Wyatt Earp (1994), turning down a scholarship at Juilliard to do so, and was one of the Joes opposite Demi Moore in Ridley Scott’s G.I. Caviezel’s first screen credit, as an airline clerk, was in Gus Van Sant’s gay love story My Own Private Idaho (1991), when he was a 23-year-old acting student from Mount Vernon, WA, near Seattle. Yet Caviezel has now hit box office gold with Sound of Freedom, a faith-based child trafficking thriller that just opened in the US and made $14.2 million to the surprise of all.įew actors’ trajectories in the past 30 years have had a more peculiar shape. ![]() But if you’re Jim Caviezel, and the film is Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), it brings the normal part of your career – when Hollywood was willing to roll out the red carpets – to a startlingly abrupt end. If you’re Leonardo DiCaprio, in any other role, you probably win an Oscar for all this. You dislocate a shoulder en route to your own crucifixion, then hang almost naked in subzero temperatures for days, meaning you come away with pneumonia and a lung infection. During a flogging scene, someone’s aim misses and you are literally flogged. You’re struck by lightning while making it. Your acting is almost universally acclaimed. It’s the role of a lifetime – physically gruelling, emotionally draining. You play a Herculean leading role in a $30 million passion project, directed by one of Hollywood’s biggest names, which is the runaway success story of the entire year, grossing over $600 million worldwide. ![]()
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