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Jim Caviezel said he’ll always be disappointed that he wasn’t able to return as Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s upcoming “Resurrection of the Christ.”
“Always will be disappointment with that one. Always will be, but I wouldn’t have been able to do this film,” he told Fox News Digital of his new movie “Ghost Soldier,” which was released on Nov. 11.
Caviezel said “there was a moment” before 2004’s “Passion of the Christ” that he might not have done the film.
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Jim Caviezel is gearing up to star in his next role, “Ghost Soldier.” (D Dipasupil/Getty Images)
“A friend of mine said, ‘I think you’re going to do well. You have to look at each film as, can you move on? Because you have this one moment,’” he said. “My initials were JC, I was 33 years old, and I couldn’t get that out of my head. And I felt like I had been prepared my life to go through this. But if I said ‘No,’ there’s no going back.”
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Caviezel said he “couldn’t live with it, so I took the film knowing that it was going to do a lot of detriment. Not much has changed in 2,000 years. Jesus is as controversial now than he’s ever been. Always will be this way. And so, but I like to engage in that.”
The characters in “Ghost Soldier” taught him the “warrior spirit. And it was the same application when we did ‘The Passion.’”
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He added that he hasn’t talked to Gibson about “The Resurrection of the Christ.”
Caviezel told Raymond Arroyo on his podcast earlier this week that Gibson “really didn’t need me” for the follow-up.
“The Passion of the Christ” starred Jim Caviezel as Jesus of Nazareth. (Lionsgate/Fathom Entertainment)
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“It’s a smaller role. The first one, it was critical. Every play. And you put that against this action film that has great substance like ‘[The Count of] Monte Cristo’ and I was the main dude in it. So good luck to the new guy ‘cause it will be really hard. As I said earlier, it’s a hell of a lot harder to play Jesus than Superman.”
Jim Caviezel stars in “Ghost Soldier.” (Vlad Cioplea/Sony Pictures)
He added, “What we did on that movie, they can’t touch it. Nothing. When I’m dead and gone, that’s an annuity. People are going to keep coming back and finding God, and I did my job.”
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In “Ghost Soldier,” which was released on Veterans Day, Caviezel plays a former Green Beret, and he said he drew on his decades-long relationship with the Navy SEALs for the part.
In Ridley Scott’s “G.I. Jane,” Caviezel played a SEAL trainee.
Jim Caviezel attending a screening of “Ghost Soldier” at Naval Air Station North Island in Coronado, California. (Getty Images for Sony Pictures)
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“So I kind of knew who they are and they’ve helped me over the years in many of the films I’ve done,” he explained. “This one came across my desk and it was authentic. Chris Papasadero, who wrote it, is a Green Beret. He was a real deal. So, it didn’t have that Hollywood fake stuff.”
Caviezel said he resonates with his character who fights against a powerful corporation threatening his rural Wyoming community.
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“I love my country, and it is a country, and a country has to have borders,” he said. And I spent a lot of time in ‘Sound of Freedom’ with a lot the guys that worked on the border and what was coming over. I don’t want terrorists in my country. I don’t want the government taking our waterway and make the land useless. I know those people because I grew up with those people. And so like James Stewart did in ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’ this character does it, but he does it in a small town, and he’s not going to allow them to do that to people he loves.”
During filming, Caviezel spent time in 36-degree water.
The actor see in ‘The Passion of the Christ’ (Alamy)
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“One thing I don’t care for is being cold,” he admitted. “We were very, very cold.”
Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” opened in New York City on Feb. 24, 2004. (Getty Images)
The actor used a mindset he learned when “G.I. Jane” when his character was going through “surf torture,” in which cadets training to be SEALs are forced to lie on the beach as the freezing Pacific Ocean washes over them.
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He said he asked SEALs who served as consultants on the film how they dealt with the cold, which also helped him during “Passion of the Christ” “because I was extremely hypothermic for five and a half months doing that film.”
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The most important thing, he said, “is that I wanted to make the veterans proud. I wanted them to see that I did my homework, and I don’t know from one film to the next whether I’m going to pull it off. And so I lean on them quite a bit. I think that is something that makes me very happy when they’re proud of the work that we did on this.”
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Caviezel feels he’s doing what he’s supposed to be with his life.
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“Every time you do a movie like this, you get a referendum by the public and they kind of determine whether or not you’re going to be seen anymore,” he said. “And so far, so good 40 years later, one film at a time. I mean, really one film at a time.”
The action-thriller film Ghost Soldier released in the United States on Nov. 11, 2026 (Veterans Day), with international rollouts on Nov. 13.