Behind The Scenes, 'The Passion Of The Christ' Was Complicated And Horrifying (2024)

What in God's name goes through someone's mind when they're playing Jesus Christ and they get struck by lightning? Considering there's a.008% chance of being struck by lightning in your life, if it happens when you're playing the Messiah in one of the most divisive movies of all time, it would be hard not to read into it just a little bit.

In an interview with Catholic News Agency, Caviezel described the event, saying: "It was the scene of the Sermon on the Mount. I climbed the mountain, clouds had formed, and five seconds before the stroke I had felt what was going to happen. It was windy, but I couldn’t hear the wind blowing. Suddenly, I was struck by the lightning.” WhileCaviezel (quite reasonably) admitted to being terrified, he said he also “felt peace on the inside.”

Gibson, however, felt nothing but confusion, asking, "What...happened to his hair?"

Assistant directorJan 'Lightning Boy' Michelinicame by his nickname honestly. While working on The Passion of the Christ, the Italian AD was struck by lightning not once, but twice, the odds of which are around onein 9 million.Producer Steve McEveetydescribed the second incident to Entertainment Weekly, which apparently happened when Micheliniand Caviezel were standing under an umbrella together. "I’m about a hundred feet away from them, when I glance over and see lightning coming out of Caviezel’s ears. Both Caviezel and Michelini got struck. The main bolt hit Caviezel and one of its forks hit Michelini’s umbrella."

WhenMicheliniwas also carrying an umbrella the first time he was struck on set. One would hope he got the hint and no longer uses umbrellas.

What is sonoteworthy about the incident involving Caviezel's lightning strikeis that his description to theCatholic News Agencyis incongruous with producerSteve McEveety'srecollectionto Entertainment Weekly. While a cynical person might think Caviezelis trying to make the event sound more miraculous, perhaps his description in this700 Club interview clarifies things:

"Five minutes after I got hit, [Jan Michelini], an assistant, walks over and says are you okay? And then he got hit. The difference was that they saw the bolt come down and hit [Jan]; they didn't see that when I was standing there. All I felt was this giant tremendous slap on my ears and a few seconds of a pink, red static in front of my eyes."

Is it possible Caviezel got struck twice without realizing it? Did Caviezel stretch the truth about his Sermon on the Mount strike? Or didMcEveetynot see what he thought he saw? Hopefullyit's the latter, but it's hard to know.

During the filming ofChrist’s scourging - the memorable momentwhenJesus was whipped -one of the actors playing a Roman torturer missed his mark a bit. As is usually the case with whipping scenes, there was a board on Caviezel'sback that was supposed to catch the blows, but after Gibson directed the whippers to try overhand, things went awry. Caviezeldescribed it to Today:

[The whip] just extended over the board and hit me with such a velocity that I couldn’t breathe. It’s like getting the wind knocked out of you. The stinging is so horrific that you can’t get air... I turned around and looked at the guy, and I tell you, I may be playing Jesus, but I felt like Satan at that moment. I turned to him, a couple of expletives came out of my mouth."

What's more, it actually happened a second time, and with that strikeCaviezel received a 14-inch gash acrosshis back. It sounds like they needed a bigger board.

In his interview with 700 Club,Caviezel recounted what it was like to hang on the cross:

"It was so cold it was like knives coming through me. I had hypothermia. I don't know whether you've dealt with that, but on one day of hypothermia I was so cold I could barely get the lines out. My mouth was shaking uncontrollably. My arms and legs went numb. I was suffocating on that cross. In the mean time, you watch people have coffee and laugh. They were very indifferent about what I was going through."

According to Today, the hypothermia gave way to pneumonia and a lung infection. The only thing more unpleasant than such upper body illnesses is the addition of upper body physical injuries. Unfortunately for Caviezel, that's exactly what happened.

The cross Caviezel was carrying reportedly weighed 150 lbs. He apparently separated his shoulder hefting the thing, and the scene in which it happened remained in the movie. Caviezelspoke to a number of outlets about the wide variety of pain he endured, generally appreciative of the end result as it captured what Jesus went through as accurately as possible, in his mind. Still, you've got to feel sorry for the guy, and there's a sense that he's perhaps a little bitter about the way people allowed all this actual suffering to go down during production.