Oscar Isaac, Evangeline Lilly to voice animated movie about the fall of Jerusalem
The original Hebrew version of Legend of Destruction was released in Israel in 2021
Deadline reports that several actors—including Oscar Isaac, Evangeline Lilly, Elliott Gould, and Billy Zane—have been hired to lend their voices to the English version of Legend of Destruction, an Israeli film about the First Jewish-Roman War and the events that led to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70.
The film is directed by Gidi Dar, whose last feature film was 2004’s Ushpizin, a heartwarming story about Orthodox Jews celebrating Sukkot in modern Jerusalem. The new film is based on 1,500 original paintings by David Polonsky and Michael Faust, whose credits include 2008’s Waltz with Bashir and 2013’s The Congress.
I could be forgetting something, but the First Jewish-Roman War hasn’t been depicted very often in film, and to the extent that it has, most of the attention—in miniseries like 1981’s Masada and 2015’s The Dovekeepers—has focused on the Jewish Zealots’ last stand in the desert fortress of Masada, which fell three years after Jerusalem.
Legend of Destruction, on the other hand, focuses on the battle in Jerusalem itself.
These are the voice actors who were announced today, and their characters:
Oscar Isaac — Ben Batich, a leader of the Sicarii, a splinter group of Zealots.
Elliott Gould — Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who played a key role in “saving the Jewish faith”, as Gould puts it, after the Temple was destroyed.
Evangeline Lilly — Queen Berenice, one of the last Herodian monarchs; Berenice also appears in the Bible, in a story set c. AD 60 (Acts 25:13-26:32).
Billy Zane — Simon bar Giora, one of the Jewish rebel leaders.
Legend of Destruction got a theatrical release in Israel in July 2021, so clips from the film have been online for a while. Here, for example, is a trailer:
And here is another clip:
The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple had a profound effect on both Judaism and Christianity. Judaism, which until that point had revolved around Temple worship, survived by focusing more than ever on studying the Torah and meeting in synagogues under the guidance of the rabbis, while Christianity—which, for its core Jewish members, had been linked to Temple worship too (Jesus appeared to Paul there in Acts 22:17-18, Paul took part in a purification ceremony there in Acts 21:26, etc.)—gravitated more and more towards winning over Gentile converts. In a nutshell, the destruction of the Temple accelerated the split between the two faiths.
So, this is definitely a story that deserves to be told on film in some capacity.
Incidentally, re: Oscar Isaac, this is not his first ancient-Roman-Empire movie. One of his first big gigs was playing Joseph in 2006’s The Nativity Story—I interviewed him on the junket for that film—and he also played Orestes in 2009’s Agora, which concerns the events leading up to the murder of Hypatia in Alexandria in AD 415.