Meet the star who plays Jesus on ‘The Chosen’
The star who plays Jesus in the “The Chosen” reveals why this adaption of Jesus’ story is so impactful.
MIDLOTHIAN, Texas ‒ Ahead of Easter, “The Chosen” will present its version of Holy Week, the days leading up to Jesus’ crucifixion.
“Season 5 is our most intense yet,” says Dallas Jenkins, creator of the first multi-season historical drama about Jesus. “There’s a million people all in one city, the enemies, the followers, the friends, the believers, the antagonists. They’re all together, and they’re all plotting either for or against Jesus.”
The eight-episode “The Chosen: Last Supper” resumes where the previous one left off, capturing a crowd celebrating the arrival in Jerusalem of Jesus (Jonathan Roumie) at the start of the week (known as Palm Sunday) and ending before Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. Like Season 4, the season will be divided into three waves for its theatrical release: Part 1 arrives in theaters March 28, Part 2 on April 4 and Part 3 on April 11. The entire season will be available to stream on Amazon Prime Video in June.
The day before filming of the Last Supper began last July, production designer James Cunningham walked through the studio, about 25 miles sourthwest of Dallas, as the blaring Texas sun, sent temperatures into the 90s.
The set was redesigned three times to fit the small space, Cunningham said. Bright yellow caution tape blocked off parts of the Garden of Gethsemane, still under construction. It was “a gigantic undertaking” that included olive trees shipped in from California and a cave.
“This is the season where some of the most iconic moments in history are taking place,” Jenkins says. “You’ve got the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. You’ve got the turning over the tables in the temple. You got the Last Supper. You got Judas’ betrayal. These are moments that have such visual and emotional weight that I think that, more than any season we’ve ever done, it demands to be seen on the big screen.”
‘The Chosen: Last Supper’: Watch the Season 5 trailer now
“The Chosen” creator Dallas Jenkins says Season 5 of the faith-based series focused on Holy Week will be the series’ “most intense and heaviest” yet.
Yet even the small moments are impactful, Jenkins says, like when Jesus is by himself shouldering the agony to come.
“What he’s thinking about happening in the future, what he’s thinking about happening in the past and what he knows is going to happen this week, it’s got such dramatic weight to it that it feels big, even though it’s just one person,” Jenkins says.
Jenkins and Roumie highlight what’s to come.
Jonathan Roumie shows off ‘extraordinary’ whip skills
Part 1 of the season shows Jesus enraged at the sight of the market in the temple, “completely boiling over with righteous indignation,” Roumie says. He’s angered that the poor are being extorted with outrageous taxes, a “breaking point” for Jesus. “To take a stand for those people and to make a point, he cleanses the temple of those influences that he feels have defiled the temple and also sets in motion a series of events that will be irreversible,” Roumie says, “leading him ultimately to the cross, which was the plan from the very beginning.”
Jesus flips tables and cracks a whip he made himself. For the scene, Roumie trained with whip master Anthony De Longis, who’s also worked with Harrison Ford on “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” and Michelle Pfeiffer for her turn as Catwoman in “Batman Returns.”
That practice paid off, Jenkins says. “There’s a really awesome moment when Jonathan swings the whip and the end of the whip wraps around a leg of a table, and he did it in one take,” Jenkins says. The shot, he says, is “extraordinary.”
The Last Supper illustrates ‘the key theme of the season’
For five days, Jenkins and his crew filmed their version of the Last Supper on a sound stage in Midlothian, Texas, more than 7,000 miles from Jerusalem. The meal, shared by Jesus and his disciples in “The Chosen,” emphasizes one of the season’s important motifs, Jenkins says.
“Jesus is telling his closest friends, ‘I’m not going to be with you much longer. But here’s what’s to come,’” he says. “And they’re like, ‘This must be a metaphor. You can’t be serious that the Messiah, the savior of the world, is going to cause more division and is going to actually leave us. That doesn’t make any sense.’ The key theme of the season is can you still trust and follow even when you don’t understand?”
Jesus’ washing of his disciples’ feet during the meal is one of the moments that touched Roumie.
“Here you have the master of this group of disciples acting as the servant to his students, and it was just profound and unheard of and shocking,” he says. “We have moments like that that we recreated, that for me and for many of the other cast members were just deeply, deeply moving. And I’m so excited for people to see what we have in store.”
Judas’ ‘very horrible and regretful’ betrayal
Knowing that Judas led the authorities to Jesus, Jenkins and his team worked backward in constructing Judas’ journey.
“I think it’s safe to say that he was a follower; he was a believer,” Jenkins says. “Something corrupted him over time, and what might that have been? That was really exciting to explore with our actor Luke Dimyan, and I think we did a job that’s effective. I think it’s plausible.”
Dimyan feels Judas’ actions stem from a place of despair.
“He’s very disappointed in what he’s seeing and hoping from the Messiah because he’s filled with so much fear and anxiety and dread for his people,” Dimyan says. “And he wants them to be saved, (and perhaps) more so, himself to be saved. And now we see the culmination of all those fears and anxieties just turn into a very horrible and regretful decision that he’s going to later feel a lot of guilt for.”
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