Jeffrey Hunter, King of Kings (1961):Playing Christ requires a certain magisterial blandness; people prefer to project their own ideas of the would-be savior
onto a hollow (and Caucasian) mannequin. That’s one reason why Willem Dafoe, an actual actor in an actual role, has had a
beefy career post-Last Temptation of Christ and why Jeffrey Hunter, of this quirky biblical epic, did not. Hunter (The Searchers) is referred to as “the James Dean Jesus,” partly because Kings director Nicholas Ray also did Rebel Without a Cause and partly because his Christ is a scruffy youth with a red, Dean-ish cloak.
Enrique Irazoqui, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964):There’s a reason you’ve (probably) never heard of Irazoqui: He wasn’t an actor. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s socialist retelling
so roots the tale in gritty realism that it stars all non-actors, most prominently Irazoqui, a 19-year-old Catalan economics
student.
Ted Neeley, Jesus Christ Superstar (1973):Less an actor than a husky-voiced singer and musician, Neeley was brought over from the Broadway mounting of the J.C. rock
opera to star in its bizarrely anachronistic movie version. Neeley nicely fit the Jesus bill: bland, wooden, humorless.
Robert Powell, Jesus of Nazareth (1977): Some people know the Brit actor from Ken Russell’s typically phantasmagoric 1974 biopic Mahler, which dramatized the composer’s religious conversion via Nazi garb. Everyone else knows him for headlining Franco Zeffirelli’s
billion-hour, all-star Jesus miniseries.
Brian Deacon, Jesus (1979):Another English Jesus in another Christian movie fave, Deacon has only one other notable film credit: Peter Greenaway’s masterful A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), in which he and his brother Eric play twin zoologists frequently going the full monty.
Jim Caviezel, The Passion of the Christ (2004): In which a monstrously unexpressive actor and energy vacuum rides to glory solely because he looked convincingly tortured
for two-plus hours. And now he’s fighting alien beasties alongside Vikings. He deserves no better.
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