Never mind my top ten list and Matt Page’s top ten list — Entertainment Weekly has posted its own list of twelve “favorite TV and movie Jesuses”, which presumably is not quite the same thing as favorite Jesus movies, but there is some overlap.
Five of the performances cited come from the past decade, and all but two of them come from my lifetime (i.e. post-1970). EW makes the usual mildly snarky comments about the actors’ pre- and post-Christ careers, but some of their choices re: the films to focus on make me scratch my head; e.g., when I think of Jeffrey Hunter’s early career, I think of his supporting role opposite John Wayne in The Searchers (1956), but there’s no mention of it here.
To my shame (uh, well, sort of, maybe), one of these performances — the one pictured above — is one that I don’t recall ever hearing about before. And there is one other film mentioned here that I have never seen, though I have known about it for some years.
But the rest, I have seen, most of them multiple times; five of them, I have on DVD; and four of them, I do not have on DVD but I do have the soundtracks on CD. And FWIW, I have interviewed two of these actors, but in conjunction with different films.
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