Caviezel starred in the 2014 football film When the Game Stands Tall as De La Salle High School coach Bob Ladouceur, whose Concord, California Spartans prep team had a 151-game winning streak from 1992 to 2003, an American sporting record. He appeared in the 2013 film Escape Plan, playing a warden who maintains order in the world’s most secret and secure prison.
James Caviezel (Wikipedia)
James Caviezel an American actor. Caviezel is known for his portrayal of Jesus Christin the film The Passion of the Christ (2004) and for his starring role as John Reese on the CBS science-fiction crime drama series Person of Interest (2011-2016).
Caviezel’s other notable roles include Dexter in Children of the Dust (1995); “Slov” Slovnik in G.I. Jane (1997); Private Witt in The Thin Red Line (1998); Black John in Ride with the Devil(1999); Detective John Sullivan in Frequency (2000); Jerry in Pay It Forward (2000); Tom Kubik in High Crimes (2002); Catch in Angel Eyes (2001); Johannes in I Am David (2003); Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo (2002); Carroll Oerstadt in Déjà Vu (2006); Willard Hobbes in Escape Plan (2013); Bob Ladouceur in When the Game Stands Tall (2014); Jimmy Bierce in The Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017) and Luke in Paul, Apostle of Christ (2018).
Caviezel was born in Mount Vernon, Washington, the son of Margaret (née Lavery), a former stage actress and homemaker, and James Caviezel, a chiropractor. He has a younger brother, Timothy, and three sisters, Ann, Amy, and Erin. He was raised in a tightly knit Catholic family in Conway, Washington.[5][6] His surname is Romansh. His father is of Slovakand Swiss descent, while his mother is Irish. His father attended UCLA and played basketball for coach John Wooden, prompting all the Caviezel siblings to play the sport.
Caviezel attended Mount Vernon High School for two years before moving to Seattle, Washington, where he lived with family friends in order to play basketball at O’Dea High School, a Catholic, all-boys high school. The following spring, he transferred from O’Dea to another Catholic school, John F. Kennedy Memorial High School in Burien, Washington, where he played basketball and graduated in 1987. He wanted to attend the United States Naval Academy but was denied three times. He then enrolled at Bellevue College, where he played college basketball. A foot injury in his second year put an end to his dream of becoming an NBA player, and he transferred to the University of Washington, where he turned his focus to acting and became a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity.
Caviezel began acting in plays in Seattle. He earned his Screen Actors Guild card with a minor role in the 1991 film My Own Private Idaho. He then moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. When he decided to move, “people thought I was out of my mind,” he said.[10]He was offered a scholarship to study acting at New York‘s Juilliard School in 1993, but he turned it down to portray Warren Earp in the 1994 film Wyatt Earp.[11][12] He later appeared in an episode of Murder, She Wrote and The Wonder Years. After appearing in G.I. Jane(1997), he had a breakthrough performance in the 1998 Terrence Malick-directed World War II film The Thin Red Line. He played Black John, a Missouri bushwhacker, in Ride with the Devil (1999), an American Civil War film.
Caviezel was originally cast to play Scott Summers / Cyclops in X-Men (2000), but dropped out because of a scheduling conflict with the film Frequency (2000). He starred in the mainstream films Pay It Forward (2000), The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), and Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004). In 2000, he played the lead role in Madison, a film about hydroplane racing in Madison, Indiana. The film was completed in 2001, but did not appear in theaters until a limited release in 2005. In 2002, he played a pivotal role in the film I Am David.
Caviezel portrayed Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson‘s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. During filming, he was struck by lightning, accidentally scourged, had his shoulder dislocated, and suffered from pneumonia and hypothermia. Prior to filming, Gibson reportedly warned Caviezel that playing Jesus would hurt his acting career. In 2011, he admitted that good roles had been hard to come by since, but stated that this movie, in particular the role of Jesus Christ, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
In 2009, Caviezel played French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam in The Stoning of Soraya M., a drama set in 1986 Iran about the execution of a young mother. When asked about how his Catholic faith was affected by this story, he said, “you don’t have to go any further than the gospels to figure out what the right thing to do is, whether you should be more concerned helping someone regardless of their religion or where they’re from”. That same year, he reprised the role of Jesus in the latest installment of The Word of Promise.
Caviezel starred in The Prisoner, a remake of the British science fiction series The Prisoner, in November 2009. From 2011 to 2016, he starred in the CBS drama series Person of Interest as John Reese, a former CIA agent who now works for a mysterious billionaire as a vigilante. The show received the highest ratings in the past 15 years for a series pilot and consistently garnered over 10 million weekly viewers.
Caviezel is the narrator for the 2016 documentary Liberating a Continent: John Paul II and the Fall of Communism, stating that “A single Polish crushed the communism. … With love” in an interview.
Caviezel portrays the Apostle Luke in the film Paul, Apostle of Christ, which opened in theaters on March 23, 2018.
It was announced January 2018, Caviezel would reprise his role as Jesus Christ in the Passion of the Christ sequel, The Resurrection of the Christ, once again directed by Gibson.
In 2019, Caviezel portrays Tim Ballard, former special agent for the Department of Homeland Security, in the movie The Sound of Freedom. The movie tells the story of the organization Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.) and its mission to save children from sex trafficking and slavery. Jim Caviezel states, “This is the second most important film I have ever done since ‘The Passion of the Christ’…. “It’s going to affect the saving of a lot of children and the changing of lives. It will also bring a lot of light into the darkness.”
In 1996, Caviezel married Kerri Browitt, a high school English teacher. They have adopted three children from China who had cancer. They are both devout Catholics. Caviezel has been a featured public speaker at religious venues since the release of The Passion of the Christ. On March 19, 2005, he was the spokesman for the first Catholic Men’s Conference in Boston.[34] Caviezel’s wife is the sister-in-law of former St. Louis Rams head coach Scott Linehan. She and Linehan’s wife, Kristen, are sisters. In 2006, Caviezel enrolled in at least one class as a part-time student at the University of Notre Dame.
