‘This Will Stay With Me Forever’—Jonathan Roumie Tells Father Mike Schmitz Portraying Jesus’ Crucifixion Left Him ‘Raw’

However, the toll on him was not merely physical. Schmitz asked Roumie about the immediate and long-term emotional cost to portraying Jesus’ Passion, comparing Roumie’s experience to that of a real-life soldier Schmitz knew of who heroically served his country but returned from war permanently disabled and who now lives with PTSD. “Will it continue to cost you, do you think?” asked Schmitz. 

“I think it has, yeah,” Roumie replied. “I spent a week in a monastery recently in the mountains seeking solitude and silence to try to begin to unpack some of the experience. And I came away with two distinct realizations.”

One was that one week was not nearly enough time to begin to understand what he had gone through. “The second thing that I realized was that this is going to take maybe the rest of my life to unpack…I have to give myself a little bit of grace, but it’s something that I think I will always live with,” said Roumie. “And in fact, I don’t know that I want to let it go because it keeps me connected to him, especially when the show ends.” 

“I’ve been sort of dreading that,” he said, although, “I’m now coming into a place of peace about it…But I now feel like, ok, I’m always going to have this experience…it’s my PTSD.”

Roumie said he had done other Passion portrayals before “The Chosen” but that the show allowed him “to enter into it in a way that I had never entered into it before.”

“Stepping back after we had filmed a number of these scenes, seeing how it affected the cast and crew, it was clear that like, okay, the Lord is going to use this in a way that is really going to convict people spiritually about what they believe,” he said.

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The experience of portraying Jesus’ crucifixion in “The Chosen” has led to a greater depth in Roumie’s personal spiritual life. “The experience of filming that and just putting myself in that meditation and now not being able to sort of disassociate myself from the experience,” Roumie said, “but to relive it going through mass…it’s something that will stay with me forever and has changed me.”

The actor said the experience has led to greater “fervor” and “reverence” in his walk with God.

“Even in the last year, I started feeling—I’ll use the word…‘convicted’—to give more reverence to Christ in his form in the Eucharist,” he said, “and I started receiving on my knees and on the tongue, which I hadn’t before. I just kept feeling the Holy Spirit [telling me], ‘No, you should do that.’”

“I’ve talked to a lot of people that are experiencing a lot of supernatural graces, and the Lord has allowed me to be a witness to,” Roumie also shared, “people that I’d never thought I’d meet and talk to and people that are on the spiritual battlefields in ways that the general public just wouldn’t understand.”