Newsbites: Israeli Jesus! Feminist Mary! Funny Moses! and more!
Newsbites: Israeli Jesus! Feminist Mary! Funny Moses! and more!
Updates on The Promised Land and Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints; new trailers; and new soundbites from the makers of The Book of Clarence and Jesus: A Deaf Missions film.
Israeli actors playing Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and others in Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints
Israel Hayom reports that two Israeli actors have joined the cast of Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, the eight-part docudrama series that is currently being produced for Fox Nation, the streaming service owned by Fox News Media.
Dar Zuzovsky is reportedly playing Mary Magdalene, who will be the subject of one episode, and Amitai Kedar is slated to play “King Herod”.
It’s a little unclear which Herod Kedar will be playing. The website that referred me to this story assumes Kedar is playing Herod the Great, the tyrant who slaughtered the babies in Bethlehem—but the only biblical saints being profiled in this series are Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist, and that Herod doesn’t figure in either of their stories. So I suspect Kedar is actually playing Herod Antipas, the tetrarch (not king, exactly, though one passage does call him that) who executed John the Baptist.
The Times of Israel says three other Israeli actors have joined the cast, too.
One of them, Ariel Yagen, is playing Jesus—and it’s quite possible he’ll be the first Jewish Israeli actor ever to play Jesus in a first-century setting in an English-language production. The only other Israeli actors I can think of who have played Jesus are Shredy Jabarin, who starred in the Arabic film The Savior (2013), and Aviv Alush, who played a present-day Jesus in The Shack (2017). (I interviewed Alush here.)
The other reported Israeli cast members in The Saints are Adva Levy and Ido Katzir, though there is no word yet as to which characters they’ll be playing.
To my knowledge, none of these actors have been in any Bible movies before.
As noted above, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints will consist of eight episodes, two of which will be about saints from the New Testament. The other six episodes will span the 3rd to 20th centuries, and will focus on Sebastian, Moses the Black, Thomas Becket, Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, and Maximilian Kolbe.
The first four episodes are set to come out November 16, and the other four episodes in May 2025. It is not clear yet if the episodes will follow the historical order in which these saints lived, or if they will come out more non-sequentially.
As it happens, Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist are the only two subjects in the series whose lives overlapped—and it’s possible that Jesus and other characters could appear in both of their stories. Will it be the same actors in both episodes, or might the show use different actors for each episode? As ever, we shall see.
Jeymes Samuel talks The Book of Clarence… again!
It has been six months since The Book of Clarence came out—nine, if you go all the way back to the film’s world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival last October—and director Jeymes Samuel is still giving interviews about it!
Hunger magazine has a short excerpt from their cover story on Samuel, and in it, he talks about how he always plays music on set to keep everyone in the mood:
JS: . . . I have my sound department Tannoy the whole set – from the interiors to the exteriors – and when I drive to set, my Bluetooth is connected. I call it my on-set sound system. As soon as it catches, they know the director has arrived. If we’re doing the turn around between scenes and we’ve got five or six minutes, that’s two songs – two bangers. I won’t play music that doesn’t match the feel of the scene, though. You want to keep the actors in character.
R: Sometimes the people on set need a boost, right?
JS: Yeah, like, I was shooting Benedict Cumberbatch on a crucifix and that day was hot. But the following day we were shooting LaKeith Stanfield on the cross and it was freezing cold. The extras and artists in the background were freezing, but not when I played something uptempo. That got them all moving.
So, the “uptempo” music got the people in a crucifixion scene “moving”, but it also kept them “in character”. Hmmm.
For more interviews with the makers of the film, check the links here.
Jesus: A Deaf Missions film director talks about music
A few weeks ago, I posted my interview with Joseph D. Josselyn, the director of Jesus: A Deaf Missions film—a dramatization of the gospels in which all of the dialogue is rendered in American Sign Language.
Since then, I have come across another interview with him that appeared at Religion Unplugged, and it covers a few topics that my own interview didn’t get into.
Most interestingly, there is this bit about the film’s use of music:
Music was another element Josselyn took seriously.
“There are deaf people who do like music and can feel the beat and the bass or access at different ways, but we aren't going to depend on it like hearing people do,” he said. “And that's a very large part of hearing media and film. So, there were a lot of things we wanted to consider bringing in, for example, some deaf musicians and hearing musicians as well, to be part of this experience to make it really show the partnership with how to reach deaf people in their visual space and in their heart language and still make it successful.”
Fascinating stuff. And the film does other interesting things with its sound mix, too.
I hope to say more about that in the relatively near future.
Video round-up: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, a feminist Mary, a Moses comedy, and rival MCU presidents
Time to round up a few videos.
First, here is the trailer for The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, which is directed by Dallas Jenkins, the creator of The Chosen. I suspect it could make for an interesting double-bill with Jenkins’ last feature film The Resurrection of Gavin Stone, as they both involve “outsiders” playing central roles in church plays. The film comes out November 8.
Next, my friend Matt Page recently discovered a trailer for Vangelo Secondo Maria, an Italian film that seems to put a feminist spin on the story of Mary and Joseph (the latter of whom is played by Alessandro Gassman, who already played Joseph in 2006’s The Holy Family, as well as the adult Jesus in 1987’s A Child Called Jesus).
Matt notes that there is a shot of Mary bathing in a river here that “physicalises Mary” in a way that most earlier films haven’t, although it does remind me a little of the Genesis Project’s word-for-word adaptation of Luke, which showed Mary bathing in a mikveh as per the “purification rites” in Luke 2:22. I wrote about that here.
Meanwhile, The Promised Land director Mitch Hudson hosted a livestream last Sunday to talk about his plans for the series, which reimagines the story of Moses and the Israelites wandering in the wilderness as a mockumentary “workplace comedy” à la The Office or Parks and Recreation. The first episode came out on YouTube last week, and Hudson said he plans to shoot the rest of the first season later this year.
And finally…
Okay, this is a bit off my beaten path here, but as a timeline obsessive and a continuity obsessive, I just have to say, I wonder if Captain America: Brave New World is going to explain how President Harrison Ford could have possibly been elected recently (the “moustache” line makes it sound like it was recent, at any rate) if President Dermot Mulroney just declared war on all aliens in Secret Invasion (and was told that his xenophobic policy was “real one-term President stuff”, which makes it sound like he was elected recently too). The Marvel Wiki says Mulroney (character name: Ritson) was elected in 2024 and Secret Invasion took place in 2026, and the next election wouldn’t be until 2028, so how far in the future is this movie set? Or are the Marvel movies just ignoring the Marvel Disney+ shows now? Anyhoo, here’s the trailer: