Animated Jesus movie gets its "villains"
Ben Kingsley and Mark Hamill have been in animated Bible movies before, while Pierce Brosnan will be the first big-screen Bond to tackle the genre.
The King of Kings—the animated South Korean Jesus movie based on Charles Dickens’ book The Life of Our Lord—has found its “villains”.
The Hollywood Reporter says three actors have joined the film’s voice cast to play the “adversaries” of Jesus—and, as it happens, two of them not only have Bible-movie experience, they have animated-Bible-movie experience, specifically:
Ben Kingsley, an Oscar winner for 1982’s Gandhi, is playing Caiaphas, the high priest who presided over Jesus’ trial for blasphemy.
Kingsley already has four Bible movies to his name: he played Potiphar in 1995’s The Bible Collection: Joseph, Moses in 1995’s The Bible Collection: Moses, and Joshua’s father Nun in 2014’s Exodus: Gods and Kings, and he narrated the animated version of The Ten Commandments in 2007.1
Star Wars veteran Mark Hamill—who has worked in animation a lot, lot more than he has in live action—is playing Herod, the king who slaughtered the babies of Bethlehem in a futile bid to kill the infant Jesus.
Hamill previously voiced Kobash the mountain lion in 1999’s The Crippled Lamb, a Christmas cartoon based on a book by Max Lucado, as well as Judah in 2000’s Joseph, King of Dreams, the prequel to The Prince of Egypt.
And James Bond veteran Pierce Brosnan is playing Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who sentenced Jesus to death.
Brosnan has never been in a Bible movie before, to my knowledge. But with this, he would be the first big-screen Bond to tackle the genre.2
These actors join a cast that already includes Oscar Isaac as Jesus, Forest Whitaker as Simon Peter, Kenneth Branagh as Charles Dickens, Uma Thurman as Charles’s wife Catherine, and Roman Griffin Davis as Charles and Catherine’s son Walter.
As I’ve noted in earlier posts, Charles Dickens wrote The Life of Our Lord as a private story for his children—it wasn’t published until after the last of them had died over 80 years later—and the film will depict the life of Jesus as a story told by Dickens to his son Walter, who finds himself “immersed” in the narrative.
The film has a website with lots of pictures and a synopsis, etc., and the studio behind the film, Mofac Animation, has a YouTube channel with a teaser for the film.
The studio is reportedly aiming to release the film around Easter 2025.
Kingsley also reportedly has a role in Terrence Malick’s Jesus movie The Way of the Wind, but it remains to be seen who he’s playing, or if he will even survive the editing process, which has been under way since 2019. (Malick is notorious for leaving entire performances on the cutting-room floor, and for whittling even major roles down to almost nothing.)
Interestingly, there is one actor who has played James Bond and has also appeared in a Bible movie, but he played James Bond on television. Barry Nelson, who played Bond in a 1954 adaptation of Casino Royale produced as part of the Climax! anthology series, also played the Pharaoh in a 1978 episode of Greatest Heroes of the Bible.
At least three big-screen Bonds have also been in movies that were arguably Bible-adjacent, insofar as those films featured (or almost featured) characters or objects from the Bible:
Sean Connery, the first big-screen Bond, drank from the Holy Grail—the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper—in 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
David Niven, who played “Sir James Bond” in the 1967 version of Casino Royale, reportedly had an uncredited role as a slave in Cleopatra, the 1934 Cecil B. DeMille film that featured Herod the Great in a secular-historical, non-biblical context.
And Daniel Craig, the most recent Bond, appeared in 2007’s The Golden Compass as Lord Asriel, a character who—if the sequels to that film had been made—would have ended up defeating Metatron, an angel who used to be the biblical figure Enoch (Genesis 5:21-24).