Awarded TV couple brings Jesus’ life to the big screen

‘HOT JESUS’ Diogo Morgado. photo by RUBEN NEPALES

LOS ANGELES—Happy Easter, dear readers! On this special day, I bring you the story of the couple behind “Son of God” and “The Bible.” He’s the Emmy-winning producer of “Survivor,” “Shark Tank and “The Voice.” She’s a Golden Globe- and Emmy-nominated actress best known for playing an angel in “Touched by an Angel.”

Married since 2007, Mark Burnett and Roma Downey produced the very popular “The Bible” TV miniseries and now, “Son of God,” the movie that quickly became a global hit.

Bigger than TV

On a recent afternoon at the Fox Studios lot, Mark and Roma, who also plays Mary, Mother of Jesus in “Son of God,” talked about how they met, how they found Diogo Morgado and brought the story of Jesus’ life to the big screen. Holding hands most of the time during our interview, the couple finished each other’s sentences, or effortlessly completed each other’s answers.

Mark recalled how the idea for yet another retelling of Jesus’ story on the big screen, this one directed by Christopher Spencer, came about. “It was in the very early days of filming ‘The Bible’ in Morocco,” Mark said in his crisp British accent. “Roma said to me, ‘We should have made a big film. This is much bigger than TV.’ We thought about it. We realized, just do it. Let’s shoot more—let’s pay to edit, get going on this, not knowing if we would ever get it into the movie theaters. We knew we could pay a theater or two to show the movie because we believed it should be seen this way (on movie theater screens). But we didn’t even dare to dream.”

PALS warned them that working together was a huge mistake. Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, however, found their collaboration a “joyous experience.” Photo by Joe Alblas/imdb.com

Mark continued, “We got a call from 20th Century Fox. Jim Gianopulos (Fox chair and CEO), having seen the movie, said, ‘We are going to release this wide—3,000 screens.’ It was on this lot [that] we sat down and made that decision with Jim.”

Of playing one of the most beloved female figures of all time, Roma said: “It’s probably the most challenging but most meaningful role of my career, to step into playing Mary, mother of Jesus. Having loved Jesus my whole life, I hadn’t considered what it must have been like to be his mother. Those scenes, especially the one at the foot of the cross, are among the most moving that I’ve ever had to step into. It was emotional for everybody in the cast and crew to reenact the horror of the death of Jesus.”

ON THEIR first date, Mark Burnett took Roma Downey to a Stevie Wonder concert. RUBEN NEPALES

Roma elaborated: “We know that Mary was the mother of the son of God. But she was also the mother of a son. It was her humanity, the personal story, that we tried to bring to the screen, to show the breaking of a mother’s heart. We know that Jesus said only seven things from the cross… and in one of those, he [expressed love and concern for] his mother.”

Chosen by God

Asked how Mary resonates in her own life, Roma replied, “I was raised a Catholic. My mother died when I was just a little girl. So Mary was such a comfort to me as a child growing up, to have in my prayers and in my spiritual walk. I have loved Jesus and his mother my whole life. What I took from playing her is how to trust God because she was such a young girl when the angel came to her, when she was chosen by God to bring His son into the world. She wasn’t just some vessel. She was a woman chosen by God.

“I don’t know if she knew all the answers or knew what her son’s would be, except that He was exceptional. We have a scene where Jesus falls with the cross. His mother is desperate to come close and touch him, to speak with him. He assures her… echoing what Gabriel said at the Annunciation: ‘Fear not… all things are possible with God.’ [This was] a woman who trusted God, who stood fast though I am sure her instinct was to run and hide.”

Answered prayer

“We prayed for him,” Roma said, laughing, when asked how she and Mark found Diogo Morgado, a Portuguese actor, who played the title role. “We were just a few weeks from beginning principal photography and we did not have an actor cast. We found Diogo through a series of extraordinary coincidences—he was brought to us. We were looking for an actor who could be strong, charismatic but also had a natural humility and could portray compassion and kindness. In essence, we were looking for an actor who could be the lion and the lamb. Diogo gave us both.”

SCENE from “Son of God”

Roma said filming the torturous march and crucifixion scenes were “certainly the most emotional days on the set. Those were also logistically challenging days because we had to put a man up on a cross. We had to figure out how to bolt the cross to the ground, make sure Diogo was safe, make sure that the cross didn’t fall over. There were very high winds on one of the afternoons and on another day, there was intense sunshine.”

Painful to watch

She continued: “We also had to figure out how Diogo was going to get down from the cross. There were all those physical challenges that added to the intensity of the day. Then, for anyone to recreate what was a truly brutal, awful way to die, to see man’s inhumanity to man play out in that way—it was very humbling.

“We worked to get a PG-13 rating. We didn’t want the violence in the scene to appear gratuitous in any way. So there are moments when it cuts back to those at the foot of the cross—Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the disciple John the Beloved and others—so the camera didn’t linger on nails being driven into hands and feet and so on. But it’s still painful to watch.”

Roma volunteered an interesting sidelight: “We had a man whose job was to clear the location of snakes and scorpions because we were shooting in a desert region. On any given day, he would clear one or two snakes. But on the morning of the crucifixion shoot, we asked everybody we knew to pray that the filming would be safe. When I got on the set, the snake man had a cloth bag on the side of the road, and it was writhing. He cleared over 40 snakes from the rocks around the cross. The symbolism of the snake was not lost on us.”

Embarrassing story
Mark said that working together only deepened his relationship with Roma. “We were told many times, ‘You are making a huge mistake working together on a project, any project.’  We’ve had such a joyous experience since we got married. We are the best of friends. It’s just great to have done this together.”

Roma chimed in, “And still be speaking to each other.” Mark agreed: “Yes. She always says that. It’s hard being married to an angel. We really are best buddies. We do a lot together.”

“People thought working together this closely could end up damaging our relationship. But we have experienced the opposite,” Roma stressed.

They met through good old-fashioned flirting, but Hollywood style. Mark narrated, “I was getting a haircut. I looked up and I saw this beautiful woman looking at me in the mirror. She looked away. I was like, okay, she’s way too beautiful. She’s just being nosy. No way, she’s looking at me. I looked back and she was looking again.”

Roma said with a smile, “There’s no way I was going to look back a third time but I did. I got caught a third time and I was just blushing. Mark left in his car and drove off. As I was paying my bill, I very discreetly asked the receptionist, ‘That guy who just left. Who was he?’ She said, ‘Well, isn’t it funny that you asked, because he just asked me who you were.’”

Mark admitted, “The story gets really embarrassing. After I got Roma’s number, I called the receptionist and got her to call Roma and ask, ‘If he calls to ask you out, will you say yes?’”

“So cute, right?” Roma quipped. “He was hedging his bets.”

“I didn’t want to get rejected, that’s the truth,” Mark remarked, with a big smile. “A message came back saying, ‘Why would I give my number if I was going to reject you?’ So we went out and the first date was…”

“He took me to a Stevie Wonder concert at the House of Blues,” Roma said, grinning. “The rest, as they say, is history.”

(E-mail the columnist at [email protected]. Follow him at https://twitter.com/nepalesruben.)