'I can't live up to that': The Chosen's Jonathan Roumie on the pressures of playing Jesus

18:56Jonathan Roumie on the pressures of playing Jesus

When you think about the biggest shows streaming on TV right now, you might picture Severance or The White Lotus. But there's one show that's been watched by an estimated 280 million people worldwide that you might not even be aware of.

It's called The Chosen, and it's a historical drama that chronicles the life of Jesus, played by Jonathan Roumie. While Roumie is not the first actor to portray Jesus on-screen (Jim Caviezel famously played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, Ted Neeley in Jesus Christ Superstar and Victor Garber in Godspell), he says The Chosen differs from anything else that's come before.

"We get a deeper glimpse into the fullness of the humanity of Jesus as a character," Roumie tells Q guest host Garvia Bailey in an interview. "As Christians, we believe that Jesus was both fully human as well as fully divine, and most of the depictions in cinematic history tend to focus on the divine and on the mystical side of Jesus, the ethereal aspect, with a very nominal, at best, amount of his humanity thrown in.

"I think one of the most recent and rare glimpses that people had ever seen of a human side to Jesus was with Mel Gibson's The Passion in 2004, where there's this sort of flashback moment that Jesus has, thinking about building a table as a carpenter, and his mother is asking him questions. He goes then … to wash up and he splashes her with water. And it's just this fun, light moment in the midst of this very heavy drama."

But big roles often come with a lot of pressure — and playing a holy figure like Jesus takes that to a whole other level. Roumie remembers being conflated with his character during a fan interaction, when they expressed their hope that he could heal them.

"I spoke at this event with Pastor Greg Laurie. He's a well-known evangelical pastor in Southern California," Roumie says. "I was getting ready to leave [when] security outside the room … basically said, 'Hey, there's a woman outside that wants to meet you, and she has a son with her who's in a wheelchair. Do you want to meet them?'"

After agreeing to meet the woman and her son, Roumie realized that the son had a condition that left him largely incapacitated and unable to move from the neck down. The mother told Roumie that their favourite scene from the show was from an episode in Season 1, where Jesus heals a man who's paralyzed.

"She says, 'That's our favourite scene. We love that scene. We came here wanting to hear you speak and I just thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if God healed my son?'" Roumie recalls.

"She's looking at me and I'm thinking, does she expect me to do that? And the only thing I could muster in this sort of slightly awkward silence was, 'Yeah, that would be amazing. I don't have that gift, but I'd be happy to pray with you if that's OK.' And she said, 'Yeah, sure, sure.' I just burst into tears because on some level … she must have been disappointed…. But I can't live up to that. I couldn't live it up to it."

Roumie says playing a figure like Jesus — "the ultimate role model of humanity" — sets an impossibly high standard that he can't live up to as an actor. The best he can do is to try and follow His example.

"There is never an end to the journey of self-improvement," he says. "And I think [Jesus] challenges us to love the people that we find the hardest to love."

The full interview with Jonathan Roumie is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. He talks more about The Chosen, Jesus as a political figure and his time interning with Norm Macdonald at SNL. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Jonathan Roumie produced by Glory Omotayo.