According to Yahoo! TV, the scenes on the cross in The Bible miniseries are brutal and difficult to watch, said producer Mark Burnett. Apparently they were just as difficult for the actors themselves. Diogo Morgado, the actor who played Jesus in miniseries, said he saw “his whole life in a flashback in front of his eyes” as he hung on the cross for hours during filming.
“I was on that cross for a long time, long hours,” says the Portuguese actor. “We shot the crucifixion sequence in three days. And I don’t know how many hours I stood there. But it was really excruciating. … As I was on the cross, I can tell you that at one point I stopped, and I looked around, and I looked at everybody working, trying to do their best, I looked at their eyes, and suddenly it struck me … I just saw my whole life in a flashback in front of my eyes.
“It’s so strong when you feel that you’re where you should be, you know, and you feel that this is what you were kind of … that you were born to, at one point, to touch people’s hearts,” Morgado continued. “If the goal of an actor is to tell the best story ever, there’s no higher story than Jesus Christ. It’s the ultimate love story, and the way he can touch people, it’s just a privilege, it’s just beyond words, having this opportunity of doing this. It was really a personal journey and a spiritual journey. And it touched me, in a way that I’m still digesting. It didn’t end with the shooting. It’s still alive.”
Producers Burnett and wife Roma Downey also told BreatheCast that “weird things happened” during the shooting of the miniseries, including unexpected but timely gusts of wind, a miraculously lost-and-found Jesus costume, and a delay of shooting to remove nearly 50 snakes from the foot of the cross. Burnett told Entertainment Weekly that “the hand of God was on this … the edit came together perfectly, the actors came together perfectly, it just comes to life.”
Learn more about bringing the miniseries to your church at TheBibleMiniseries.com.
