Before Jonathan Roumie landed a role as Jesus on “The Chosen,” he ran out of money “and had no other alternative than to completely and wholly rely” on faith.
That’s according to a recent interview Roumie did with NewsNation.
“The Chosen” is a historical drama and an Angel Original series about the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. Roumie, who plays Jesus, has also starred in the movie “Jesus Revolution,” which is about the Jesus movement of the 1960s and ’70s.
When Roumie was growing up, he told Adrienne Bankert of NewsNation he wanted to be an astronaut, but by high school, he knew he wanted to work in film. After deciding he wanted to pursue directing, he tried acting to be a better director. And he ended up sticking with acting after booking his first role.
After Roumie spent three years in Los Angeles pursuing his acting career, he realized his idea of how his career was going to go was different from reality. “I got to a point where I was desperate and out of money and out of food and I just realized in the moment that I had no other alternative than to completely and wholly rely on my faith and to just offer everything up in prayer,” he told Bankert. “To surrender my notions, my concept of what it meant to have a career, to be successful, to survive, and just offer that up to God.”
But “in a matter of hours,” Roumie said to NewsNation that his life changed and his financial woes were significantly reduced. Then, he was cast in “The Chosen.” Roumie said he feels like he and Dallas Jenkins (creator and director of “The Chosen”) are divinely connected and it was “part of God’s plan” for them to work together on “The Chosen.”
The full interview is available on NewsNation.
Roumie has spoken openly about his faith at length before.
He’s something of a Christian influencer, as Gideon Jacobs described him in The New Yorker. If you scroll through Roumie’s Instagram, you’ll see post after post of him praying with a rosary, advertising the Hallow app alongside fellow Catholic actor Mark Wahlberg and talking about how God led him to where he is.
In a previous interview on “The Parting Shot with H. Alan Scott,” Roumie opened up about what it’s like to be openly Roman Catholic while in Hollywood.
“I’ve had people at one time or another, even people on my team, that were like ‘Hey, you might want to downplay your faith,’ ... and I didn’t quite get that,” Roumie said to Scott. His faith is “so much a part of who I am and my life that I have no problem talking to anybody about it.”
Season 4 of “The Chosen” will be released in January or February 2024. It’s expected to be a theatrical release.