"In Hollywood, Caviezel is known as Gentleman Jim. The devout Catholic and devoted husband to his schoolteacher wife, Kerri, politely refused to do a love scene with Jennifer Lopez in last year's Angel Eyes, until she covered those famous breasts. He's also the guy with eyes like windows. Blue pools, so cloudless, they seem liquid, transparent. On the screen, Caviezel's natural intensity can unnerve. He seems to stare back at audiences, as if he's in a trance or hyperfocused on a different plane the rest of us don't know about.
With his coal-black hair, tall, lean build and angular face, he looks, frankly, just as you'd like to envision the Son of God. Caviezel was Gibson's first choice. It's the fourth time, Caviezel says, he has been offered the role of Jesus. Before, he's always said no. This time he took the Aussie-bred director's offer because Gibson -- a deeply devout Roman Catholic himself, who has a private chapel in the backyard of his home in Malibu, Calif. -- understood the importance of this project. Promised to treat it with the respect it deserves. And, above all else, is committed to recreating Jesus's last hours -- from the Garden of Gethsemane to his death -- as authentically as possible. This will be nothing like a Ben Hur-type epic recreation. Or a bizarre account like Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ."