Faith-based entertainment is booming, thanks to a ready-made audience and the backing of the American right. The TV series The Chosen, with Jonathan Roumie playing Christ, claims to have reached more than a quarter of a billion viewers. And this is just the tip of the iceberg …
If you’re looking for your own personal Jesus this Easter, you’ve never had it so good. Faith‑based entertainment is booming like never before, offering up myriad new screen Messiahs and resurrecting a few old ones. But if there’s a Christ for our times, it is surely Jonathan Roumie, the Irish-Arab-American star of the smash-hit biblical TV series The Chosen.
Nine years ago, Roumie was just another struggling actor in Los Angeles, desperately seeking his big break. He was also a practising Catholic. One morning, as Roumie tells it, he prayed for divine intervention: “I literally said: ‘God, you take this from me. It’s in your hands now. It’s not up to me.’” Three months later, he was cast as Jesus in The Chosen, a series seeking to retell the story of Christ as a bingeable long‑form drama, rather than the usual earnest myth‑making – with high production values, down-to-earth characters, historical context and a seven-season arc that’s not afraid to embellish scripture.
