Should Israeli actors star in Bible movies?
Social-media users are protesting the fact that Netflix's upcoming Mary movie has a mostly Jewish-Israeli cast rather than, say, a Palestinian one.
Today in controversy: Apparently there’s a bit of a social-media storm right now over the fact that Mary, the Bible movie coming to Netflix next month, features Jewish-Israeli actors in most of the key roles, including that of Mary herself.
As reported by Israel Hayom, The Jewish Chronicle, and The Jerusalem Post, some social-media users are insisting that these roles should have been played by Palestinians or “indigenous Levantine Christian actors”, and not by “Zionist settlers”.
The New Arab and Middle East Eye have also reported on the controversy, but their stories don’t mention some of the more incendiary tweets.
Mary director DJ Caruso, a Catholic, said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly last month that he hired Israeli actors “to ensure authenticity.”
But the Forward’s Mira Fox says aiming for ethnic accuracy in casting “begins to veer uncomfortably close to race science”, no matter which ethnicity one thinks the actors playing Mary, Joseph, and the other characters should be.
This is a topic that keeps coming up whenever there’s a new film set in the distant past, so I’m just going to rattle off a few points of my own here, with links to some earlier posts and articles of mine that might help put this in a broader context:
First, a quick fact-check: A number of people have spoken as though Netflix made this film, but Netflix did not actually produce Mary; instead, they acquired the film two months ago, after it had already been completed.
Some people are claiming that Israeli actress Noa Cohen was cast as Mary “during” the present conflict(s) in the Middle East, but the movie started filming in January—only three months after the terrorist attacks that sparked the present conflict(s). It can take a while to put a movie’s cast and crew together, so it’s quite possible she was hired before the attacks took place.
Mary producer Mary Aloe has been trying to make a movie about Mary since at least 2008 (which, incidentally, is several years before before Netflix started making its own movies), and the list of actors who have been attached to the film at one point or another includes Odeya Rush, an Israeli actress who was cast as Mary back in 2012. So the filmmakers’ interest in (and openness to) Israeli actors goes back long, long before the current political situation.
I wrote an article on “ethnic accuracy” in Bible movies for the Mennonite Brethren Herald shortly before 2006’s The Nativity Story came out; that film featured a number of Arab and Iranian supporting actors, as well as actors who could “pass” for Middle Eastern (because they were part-Maori or Latin American).
I believe the first Jewish-Israeli actor to play Jesus onscreen was Aviv Alush, who played him in 2017’s The Shack. I interviewed Alush here.
Prior to that, Arab-American actor Haaz Sleiman played Jesus in 2015’s Killing Jesus. I interviewed Sleiman on the set of that film, and after the world premiere.
I also wrote articles on non-white Jesus movies for The Federalist and Books & Culture around the time that Killing Jesus came out.
Palestinian filmmaker Robert Savo has produced and/or directed a series of Arabic Bible films that are worth a look. His films about Abraham and Isaac do some particularly interesting things with Ishmael, the traditional ancestor of modern Arabs—but see also his films about Adam & Eve, Noah, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, Elijah, and Jesus. (I have not yet seen his film about David.)
Quite a few “Bible films” have come out of Iran, too, though those films follow the Muslim tradition rather than the Judeo-Christian one—so, for example, Jesus is not crucified, and Abraham puts Ishmael rather than Isaac on his altar. Iranian “Bible films” that I have written about, whether briefly or at length, include films about Abraham, Jacob and Joseph, Solomon, Mary, and Jesus.
The controversy over Mary definitely does not mark the first time that people have gotten up in arms over the casting of an ancient or biblical film. Social-media users protested when black actors did not play the Egyptian oppressors in 2014’s Exodus: Gods & Kings. And then Egyptians protested when a black actress did play the last of the pharaohs, Cleopatra, in a Netflix series last year.
But sometimes there is no controversy at all. Israeli actor Avi Azulay played Moses in the Netflix series Testament: The Story of Moses eight months ago, and if anyone complained about his casting at the time, I certainly never heard about it.
Israeli actors are also reportedly playing Jesus, Herod, Mary Magdalene, etc. in Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, which starts streaming on Fox Nation today. Will there be any controversy over those casting choices?
Make of all that what you will.
Me, I’m sympathetic to Mira Fox’s point that the real issue with Mary is the casting of Anthony Hopkins, a Welshman of no known Middle Eastern descent, as the part-Edomite, part-Arab King Herod. Hopkins really does stand out from the rest of the cast in a way that, say, Ciarán Hinds—the Irishman who played King Herod in The Nativity Story—did not.
Incidentally, ethnicity isn’t the only controversial thing about Mary.
One Protestant website that popped up in my feed says the film will be “very, very, very Roman Catholic” because the director has indicated that the film will dramatize the story of Mary’s miraculous birth, which does not come from the Bible but, rather, is first written about in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of James.
However, some Catholics are already objecting to the fact that the film’s trailer shows Mary experiencing labour pains, which the Infancy Gospel of James goes out of its way to say she did not experience. So, how “very, very, very Roman Catholic” can this movie be, really?
More later, perhaps. The film starts streaming on Netflix December 6.
November 20 update: I added a paragraph about the possible timing of Noa Cohen’s casting relative to the current conflict(s) in the Middle East.