1. Jim Caviezel played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, Tim Ballard in Sound of Freedom, and starred as John Reese on the CBS series Person of Interest.
43 Facts About Jim Caviezel
1. 2.
Jim Caviezel has a younger brother, Timothy, and three sisters, Ann, Amy, and Erin.
3.
Jim Caviezel was raised in a tight-knit Catholic family in Conway, Washington.
4.
Jim Caviezel's father is of Swiss and Slovak descent, while his mother is Irish.
5.
Jim Caviezel played basketball in high school and at Bellevue College.
6.
Jim Caviezel had aspirations of playing professionally, but suffered a foot injury in his second year.
7.
Jim Caviezel says that at age 19 while watching a movie in a theater, he felt a sense of peace overcome him and that God was asking him to become an actor.
8.
Jim Caviezel earned his Screen Actors Guild card with a minor role in the 1991 film My Own Private Idaho.
9.
Jim Caviezel then moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting.
10.
Jim Caviezel was offered a scholarship to study acting at New York's Juilliard School in 1993, but he turned it down to portray Warren Earp in the 1994 film Wyatt Earp.
11.
Jim Caviezel had a breakthrough performance in the 1998 Terrence Malick-directed World War II film The Thin Red Line.
12.
Jim Caviezel had met with Malick several times before securing the role and had told his wife that if he did not get a role in the film, he intended to quit show business and move back to Washington.
13.
Jim Caviezel later played Black John, a Missouri bushwhacker, in Ride with the Devil, an American Civil War film.
14.
Jim Caviezel starred in the mainstream films Pay It Forward, Angel Eyes, and The Count of Monte Cristo.
15.
Jim Caviezel was first approached about playing Jesus Christ in The Passion of the Christ through his agent, who told him Mel Gibson and his partner were interested in him for a role in an unrelated screenplay, which he later learned was a cover story.
16.
Jim Caviezel met with Gibson in Malibu, and after more than three hours of conversation, brought up the role of Jesus, which Jim Caviezel accepted.
17.
Jim Caviezel described the filming of the movie as "torture".
18.
Jim Caviezel awoke as early as 2:00 AM for eight-hour makeup sessions which led to skin infections, and headaches because one of his eyes was closed shut.
19.
Jim Caviezel was accidentally scourged for real during the scourging at the pillar scene because one of the actors playing a Roman soldier missed the wooden board which had been set up behind his back.
20.
The cross he carried in the film weighed over 150 pounds and at one point, Jim Caviezel fell under the weight of it and bit his tongue.
21.
Jim Caviezel was struck by lightning during the last shot of filming, which was the Sermon on the Mount scene.
22.
Jim Caviezel said the experience of filming The Passion deepened his faith.
23.
Jim Caviezel's career struggled in the years immediately following The Passion, which grossed over $600 million at the box office and was the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time.
24.
Jim Caviezel did have roles in three films released in 2004 which had been filmed prior to the release of The Passion, starring in Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius and Highwaymen, and had a supporting role in The Final Cut, which starred Robin Williams.
25.
Jim Caviezel's career rebounded when he was cast as the villain opposite star Denzel Washington in the 2006 thriller Deja Vu, which was a box office hit.
26.
Jim Caviezel provided the voice of Jesus on the 2007 New Testament audio dramatization The Word of Promise.
27.
Jim Caviezel starred in The Prisoner, a remake of the British science fiction series with the same name, in November 2009.
28.
From 2011 to 2016, Jim Caviezel starred in the CBS drama series Person of Interest as John Reese, a former CIA agent who now works for a mysterious billionaire as a vigilante.
29.
Jim Caviezel drew on martial arts training he had done as a child and boxing experience as an adult to do most of his own stunts.
30.
Jim Caviezel was nominated for the People's Choice Award for Favorite Dramatic TV Actor in 2014 and again in 2016 for his work on Person of Interest.
31.
However, Jim Caviezel left the project due to creative differences before production began and was replaced by David Boreanaz.
32.
Jim Caviezel starred in the 2014 football film When the Game Stands Tall as De La Salle High School coach Bob Ladouceur, whose Concord, California, Spartans prep team had a 151-game winning streak from 1992 to 2003, an American sporting record.
33.
Jim Caviezel appeared in the 2013 film Escape Plan, playing a warden who maintains order in the world's most secret and secure prison.
34.
Jim Caviezel portrayed the Apostle Luke in the film Paul, Apostle of Christ, which opened in theaters on March 23,2018, to mixed reviews.
35.
Jim Caviezel starred in the 2020 political thriller film Infidel, produced by Dinesh D'Souza.
36.
In 1996, Jim Caviezel married Kerri Browitt, a high school English teacher.
37.
Jim Caviezel said he said he was "completely terrified" at the possibility of adopting a disabled child but knew God wanted him to do it.
38.
In 2006, Jim Caviezel was featured with actress Patricia Heaton and Missouri athletes Kurt Warner and Mike Sweeney in an advertisement opposing Missouri Constitutional Amendment 2, which allowed any form of embryonic stem cell research and therapy in Missouri that is otherwise legal under federal law.
39.
Jim Caviezel began the advertisement by saying, "Le-bar nash be-neshak", a reference to Judas's betrayal of Jesus Christ and a phrase used in the Gospel According to Luke.
40.
Jim Caviezel mentioned that Ballard was supposed to be appearing at the conference but was "saving victims of trafficking" who were victims of "adrenochroming", a practice whose existence is suggested by QAnon adherents.
41.
Jim Caviezel suggested he had seen evidence of children being subjected to the practice.
42.
Jim Caviezel claimed that "the storm is upon us", a slogan associated with QAnon echoing the belief in a final battle against evil and repeated the battle cry of William Wallace in Braveheart, urging the audience to "[send] Lucifer and his henchmen straight back to hell where they belong".
43.
Jim Caviezel claimed he was unaware of QAnon when the movie was filmed in 2018, and subsequently defended followers of QAnon, claiming that they were being persecuted and comparing them to the Christians in the New Testament.