From Jesus Christ to Jesus freak
Jonathan Roumie, star of the life-of-Jesus series The Chosen, plays hippie preacher Lonnie Frisbee in the upcoming movie Jesus Revolution
Lonnie Frisbee, the hippie preacher who helped launch the Calvary Chapel movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, used to say that he looked like Jesus—and now he’s going to be played by an actor who is best known for playing Jesus.
That actor is Jonathan Roumie, star of The Chosen, and the movie he’s playing him in is Jesus Revolution, from producers Jon and Andrew Erwin.
Frisbee is not the main character of the film, and Roumie is not its biggest star. The film’s main protagonist is Greg Laurie, a still-active pastor who was mentored by Frisbee as a teenager (and is played in the film by Joel Courtney). And the biggest name in the cast is Frasier’s Kelsey Grammer, who is playing Chuck Smith, the pastor who founded Calvary Chapel and led it until his death half a century later.
But if the movie’s Facebook page is anything to go by, the studio is leading its promotional efforts with Roumie as Frisbee. They have already posted two images of Roumie in character—one from behind and one from in front—and yesterday they released a poster, which emphasizes the Jesus-like figure in the water. (In fairness, the Facebook page also has a behind-the-scenes shot of Courtney in costume.)
A few quick random thoughts about this:
For what it’s worth, I have read a draft of the screenplay, but I won’t analyze it here because the script has probably gone through any number of rewrites since the version I saw. But assuming the film still has the same basic shape as the script, my comments below are informed by what I’ve read.
Roumie is 48 years old, and was already part of a recent trend of actors in their 40s playing Jesus, who was only 30 or so in the gospels.1 Now Roumie is playing someone even younger: Frisbee was 18 when he started working with Chuck Smith, and the script identifies him as a 21-year-old. Either way, that’s less than half Roumie’s current age! Roumie is literally old enough in real life to be his character’s father. Will he be believable as a member of the youth culture?2
Come to think of it, Chuck Smith was only in his early 40s when the film takes place, so Roumie is older now than Smith was then, too. But Smith is being played by Kelsey Grammer, who is currently 67, so there will still be a big age gap between the movie versions of Frisbee and Smith.
Joel Courtney, at least, is only 26, and is thus less than a decade older than Greg Laurie was when the movie takes place. (Laurie was 16 in the summer of 1969, but the script I read says he’s 19.) In this case, the gap between the actor’s age and the character’s age is no big deal, as there’s a long tradition of actors in their early to mid-20s playing teenagers. But the real-life Laurie and Frisbee were only a few years apart—there’s even a line to this effect in the script I read—so how is that dynamic going to work onscreen, with these actors?
The film is named after a 1971 cover story in Time magazine. Notably, the Jesus played by Roumie in The Chosen also said he was starting a “revolution”.
Frisbee was a complicated figure, and the film will apparently hint at that by getting into some of the power struggles between Smith and Frisbee—though it seems the film will probably ignore Frisbee’s homosexuality. At any rate, if the advertising for this movie leans heavily into the idea that “Frisbee is being played by Jesus (or at least by an actor who is best-known for playing Jesus)”, what will audiences make of the scenes in which Frisbee seems to let his fame and possibly even his supernatural power go to his head? Will they be prepared for a critical portrayal of Frisbee? Will they be prepared to separate Lonnie Frisbee from the Jesus whose image he emulated? Or will this film encourage audiences to conflate Frisbee and Jesus? And how will playing a clearly flawed Jesus wanna-be like Lonnie Frisbee affect audience response to Roumie’s performance as Jesus himself in future seasons of The Chosen?
Jesus Revolution is one of four films that were announced when producers Jon and Andrew Erwin unveiled the creation of their production company, Kingdom Studios, and its distribution deal with Lionsgate, back in 2019. The first film, I Still Believe, came out in 2020, just a few days before the Covid lockdowns began. Jesus Revolution is the second film from that list to be completed, though the Erwin brothers have also produced the documentary The Jesus Music and the sports biopic American Underdog in the interim. The two films announced in 2019 that have not been made yet are The Drummer Boy, which was described as a “period musical”, and The Apostles: Resurrection of Christ, which was supposed to be the first in a trilogy that would kick off “a new cinematic universe of Biblical stories”. Needless to say, I’m keen to see that last one.
Incidentally, I’ve interviewed a few of the people involved with this film:
I interviewed co-director Jon Erwin in 2018, when he was promoting the drama I Can Only Imagine and the documentary Steve McQueen: American Icon.
I took part in a group interview with co-star Kelsey Grammer in 2014, when he was on the set of Killing Jesus in Morocco.
I interviewed co-star DeVon Franklin, who plays a news reporter named Josiah, on the Winnipeg set of Breakthrough in 2018.
I also interviewed filmmaker David Di Sabatino when he released his documentary Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher in 2005. Frisbee had been largely written out of the history books until Di Sabatino made his movie—I say this as one who grew up in the evangelical subculture of the 1970s and 1980s and had never heard of Frisbee until Di Sabatino made his film—so it’s probably no exaggeration to say that Jesus Revolution would not have assumed the form it has if Di Sabatino hadn’t put Frisbee back on the map. So check out that documentary if you can.
Finally, here is the poster that was released yesterday:
Jesus Revolution is coming to theatres February 2023.
Other actors in this vein include Ewan McGregor in Last Days in the Desert (2015), Cliff Curtis in Risen (2016), and Joaquin Phoenix in Mary Magdalene (2018).
The real-life Frisbee died in 1993, at the age of 43. So Roumie is already older now than Frisbee ever got to be.