News: Please be patient while modifications are made to the new themes to add in familiar menus and features.
As Sean Bean read the screenplay for “The Young Messiah,” the story of a young Jesus Christ just beginning to understand who he is, the actor says it was the parts of the story that he didn’t know that appealed to him much more than those that he did.“I thought it was an interesting, fresh look at the story of a young boy Jesus,” Bean said by phone from England a few days before the film opened today. “Obviously, there have been countless stories about Jesus and his life, ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ and things relating to the birth of Jesus.“We kind of all know the story of Jesus but I thought it was a very kind of refreshing and informative rendition – knowing what we know, how he came into the world and how he left the world,” Bean says. “I thought it was very moving, very poignant.“Certainly when he holds his arms outstretched near the end, almost in that kind of pose when he’s on the cross, a kind of premonition which leaves you with a sense of foreboding but also a sense of hope.”“The Young Messiah” looks at the life of Jesus when he was 7 and just home to Israel from exile in Egypt. It’s a part of his life that gets much less attention in the Bible, though Anne Rice’s novel “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt,” the source material for the film, uses biblical and historical accounts as its foundation.The film stars Adam Greaves-Neal as Jesus, with Bean – whose many credits include the warrior Boromir in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and Ned Stark on HBO’s “Game of Thrones” – playing Severus, a Roman centurion ordered by Herod to find and kill the boy rumored to be the Messiah.The film is directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh, whose film “The Stoning of Soraya M.” had impressed Bean, and its producers include Chris Columbus, for whom Bean had recently played Zeus in “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.”Their backgrounds made him confident in the project – “I felt very much in good hands,” Bean says – but it was the freshness of the approach to the story of Jesus that mostly drew him in.“The Young Messiah” in many ways is a subtle story, a gentle telling of Jesus’ slow realization of the truth of his life. Its open quality was another aspect of the production that attracted Bean.“I’m Christian, so I’m familiar with the stories, though I’m no theologian by any means,” he says. “It’s always interesting as an adult to go back on things and look at things in a fresh light. Because you’re taught things at an earlier age and they’re not really presented in an interesting manner.“I think this kind of brings this story to life, and it’s actually very credible,” Bean says. “You know, rather than having it drummed into you or having it taught, it leaves it open for you to make up your mind. It’s very open-minded.“So I think that’s one of the good qualities and beauty of the film – that it’s not a kind of sanctimonious, kind of pontificating deal with religion about what we should believe, what we should not believe. It’s the story that’s presented for the viewer to make up their own mind.”His character of Severus – a creation of Rice, not a figure from the Bible – has relatively few lines, with much of his acting done quietly, an emotion that crosses his face, a reaction to the words of another character. As he’s sent out to hunt the boy Jesus for Herod, you can see him move from grudging obedience to concern that he might not be doing the right thing and finally to acceptance that the boy is special and should protected, not harmed.“I think the character of Severus is a representation of Jesus’ consciousness, his human consciousness,” Bean says, adding that his character evolves “from doing the will of the Romans to actually, truly believing in this young boy and what he could bring to the world.”“Obviously Severus had a very powerful transformation in his psychology and spirituality, and I think that kind of represents the society at the time,” he says. “This one man represents the whole raft of ideologies at the time that converted to Christianity. For me it was more symbolic. I just tried to flesh him out and give him some life.”Asked whether he sees similarities between the Bible as source material and the novels by J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin that served as the basis for “Lord of the Rings” and “Game of Thrones,” Bean says he does.“The stakes are so high,” he says of the stories shared across their many pages. “Tolkien was quite a religious man and so is George R.R. Martin. They kind of have this epic quality about them when they write the material.”And beneath them all are echoes of Greek myths, he says.“Behind it all there’s morals and principles and fairness and love and treachery,” Bean says. “One of the things I think that comes across in ‘The Young Messiah’ is that the message is that it takes love – that’s kind of the overriding kind of emotion that the Bible professes.“We all know it’s been used for nefarious purposes, the Bible, by various politicians and churches and organizations in the past,” he says. “But when you do actually look at the Bible, or have a chance to try and get to the bottom of it, you find that the overriding message is love and compassion and fairness and truth. And I think that applies to ‘Lord of the Rings’ and the Greek myths.“There’s always a sense if you do the right thing, that’s probably the best thing to do because things have a habit of coming back at you and you get your just desserts. There’s a certain fatality to these stories that personally I’m quite drawn to.”With its opening two weeks before Easter, “The Young Messiah” is perfectly timed for Christians. But Bean says he thinks the film can appeal to people of all faiths, or no faith at all.“It doesn’t beat you over the head with a stick about religion,” he says. “It’s not forcing you to believe anything. It’s just a very, very interesting
