When Jesus walked in Leicester Square

As the The Chosen’s latest series premieres, Natalie Garrett analyses the TV show’s appeal.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

A group of actors walk together at a film premiere

Jonathan Roumie, centre, with the cast of The Chosen.

So, I’ve met Jesus twice before. Over 20 years ago, I joined the cast of The Life of Christ at Wintershall, the epic outdoor drama experience that takes you through the story of Jesus’ life (and it’s still going strong). As well as being Crowd Person 176, with glorified tea towel on head, I was cast as the bride at the wedding at Cana. Apart from Jesus, the rest of the cast were local, normal people (as in not professional actors) and I rather shyly attended the first rehearsal knowing no-one. I had been sitting on my own for a bit when Jesus walked in and caught my eye. He walked straight over to me and shook my hand, “You must be Natalie,” he said. For just a moment, I forgot that he was an actor and I thought, “You really are Jesus, you know me by name!” But then I remembered that I was the only new addition to the cast, and he was just a really nice guy welcoming me to the company.

Some eight or so years later, I was involved with the Oxford Passion, a Passion play written for and produced by Creation Theatre company in Oxford. I helped write the script and played the role of Mary Magdalene. The actor, Tom Peters, who played Jesus in that production was incredible. As an actor and as a Christian, it was an extraordinary experience, sharing some powerful scenes with Jesus. Each night for several weeks, I had to watch my beloved Christ being crucified all over again. I wept deeply, every night.

Then fast forward to Monday 22 January 2024, and I’m at the cinema UK cinema Premiere of season four of The Chosen in London’s Leicester Square and I see Jesus walk the red carpet. Surreal.

So, there I was, in all my finery, lurking about, hoping to get a selfie with Jesus.

In case you haven’t come across The Chosen, it’s a ground-breaking historical drama series. Created, directed, and co-written by filmmaker Dallas Jenkins, it is the first multi-season series about the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Primarily set in Judaea and Galilee in the first century, the series centres on Jesus and the different people who met and followed or otherwise interacted with him. The emphasis is on portraying the “authentic Jesus” through the point of view of the people who spent time with him, asking the question, what did it really look like to be a follower of Jesus? It has quickly become a highly successful crowdfunding project, with episodes viewed 700 million times and a big vision to reach a billion viewers by the end of season seven.

Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, says,

“Our fanbase was entirely Christian at first, but because of its popularity the show has attracted people from all faiths and no faith to the character of Jesus. We’re trying to really portray his message of love and tender mercy.”

To raise awareness for the show, which can be streamed on Netflix and Amazon Prime (or for free on The Chosen app), season four was launched with a cinema release in Leicester Square. So, there I was, in all my finery, lurking about, hoping to get a selfie with Jesus. And I had to pinch myself. When did Jesus become a world-wide celebrity with people whooping and whistling and jostling for his attention? Well, it happened when he rode a donkey into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday, but not so much in the last 2,000 years, especially not in recent years in the West.

What have the creators of The Chosen got so right that millions of people tune in to binge watch the narrative of the gospel story?

First up, Jesus laughs. A lot. He smiles and he hugs people. He is intensely personable and bloke next door-y (he’s not very good at ball games for one thing). But he also, when necessary, exerts huge personal authority. There is a confident, courageous, generous, humility to him that is hugely attractive. When the going gets tough, you think, he’d be good to have around. But also, he’s great company around the dinner table, telling stories and listening, too.

Because of the way the story is told, through the eyes of those who knew Jesus, we get drawn into the personal dramas of the Twelve Disciples as well as a wider group, including several women. It even includes some Romans, who are clearly the “bad guys” but drawn equally plausibly as the other more sympathetic characters. In the lives of these people, we find the domestic reality of the human experience – working hard to put food on the table, relating to family members, suffering illness and even miscarriage. And then we see the difference that it makes to have the Son of God around. And that’s the hook, that’s what means the viewer becomes deeply invested in the show because it turns out the people in the Bible aren’t super spiritual giants, they are people just like you and me. They struggle with the day-to-day realities of life, they’re confused, and they mess up. And then they meet Jesus.

It’s a huge risk creating a show when everyone knows how it ends. As we watch, even the early seasons, we know where the narrative arc is going. And yet, somehow, we still want to find out what happens. Because: we are invested in the stories of the Roman Centurion who looks as if he might come over to the light side; we’re keen to find out how Simon Peter and his wife get over their marital difficulties; we’re cheering for the success of the olive oil business set up by Zebedee (that’s James and John’s Dad) along with the help of some shrewd businesswomen who are also numbered amongst The Chosen.

When I see a dramatized version of any book I’ve read, I usually get quite angry – “that’s not what he/she looks like! That’s not how they talk!” And dramatizing part of the bestselling book of all time, the four Gospels of the Bible, is quite a risky choice for a TV programme. But I recognise the Jesus in The Chosen as the Jesus I know and love. And there is no higher accolade I can give than that.

The extraordinary success of the show is that millions of people have watched it and been drawn in. Millions of people have invested not just their time and viewing commitment, but also their own money. The show is entirely crowdfunded, and the show’s makers are deeply committed to building community around what they’re doing. Fans are invited to participate in the crowd scenes (being the 5,000 who get fed, for example) and there is almost as much behind-the-scenes content produced as the show itself. There’s a buzz around what they’re doing and it’s spreading way beyond the homes of a Christian fanbase.

When Jonathan Roumie arrived for the season four premiere in Leicester Square, it was like a rock star had stepped out of the car, such was the reach and excitement around his portrayal of Jesus in The Chosen. For hundreds of years, Christian artists have used the creative arts at their disposal – stained glass windows, music, fine art – to try to convey the authentic Jesus to the world. In our time, TV programmes are the artform of greatest impact and the digital distribution now available to the makers of The Chosen affords unprecedented access to their material around the world, as they aim to dub it into 600 languages ensuring 95 per cent of people worldwide can watch it spoken in their native language.

Is it too soon to suggest that The Chosen may be the Sistine Chapel of our age? It’s certainly too early to try guess the impact that this cultural phenomenon will have on the world’s faith journey. But if the reaction on the red carpet at Leicester Square last Monday night is anything to go by, Jesus seems to be making a comeback.

Episodes 1&2 of season four of The Chosen are showing in UK cinemas from Thursday 1 February 2024 - with other episodes being released later in the month. This is the first time ever that a full season of a streaming TV show will be released exclusively in cinemas.

Article

Culture

Holidays/vacations

Mental Health

Wildness

18 July 2025

5 min read

This is why we must go down to the sea

Stepping off the shore restores more than our sanity

Paul Bradbury

Paul is a pioneer minister, writer and researcher based in Poole, Dorset.

A sunset over an island casts golden light on the sea and a beach.

An Argyll beach.

Nick Jones.

It’s that time of year again. Much of Britain has been enjoying (or possibly enduring) a heatwave, the summer holidays are approaching, and our thoughts naturally turn toward an escape from our ordinary, often urban, landlocked, lives. And for many of us that escape will be to the sea. It’s true, we really do like to be beside the seaside. As a nation our souls seem to suffer from an annual experience like that described in John Masefield’s poem Sea-Fever as we head coastwards muttering ‘I must go down to the sea again...’

We want to holiday by the sea – as the market for second homes in places like Cornwall will confirm. We also want to live permanently by the sea, or at the very least by the water. Some experts estimate that properties by the water have an average increased value of around 48 per cent. Water sells. It does so perhaps because proximity to it provides something of a mental escape from the overwhelming rigidity and linearity of our predominantly urban environments.

Iain MacGilchrist has argued that our modern lives suffer from the triumph of the left-brain hemisphere’s attention to the world. This is a focussed attention that is all about controlling and getting. It leads to the creation of a self-contained and ordered world with little attention to context. And so little attention to the natural, complex, fluid reality of creation. MacGilchrist goes on to correlate the rise in a variety of mental illnesses characterised by what he calls ‘right hemisphere deficits’ with industrialisation and the development of our culture of modernity.

In his book Blue Mind Wallace Nichols explores the evidence for the positive effect of water on the brain. He highlights how a proximity to water can heal, restore, give us a sense of connection and promote calm. He argues that water can shift our minds into what he calls ‘drift’, the kind of mental attention which generates calm. Being with, on, better still in water, is undoubtedly good for us. No wonder we are drawn to it.

Yet at the same time water, and particularly the sea, has been a source of terror. A no-go area ‘where there be dragons’, OK, lobsters for sure, probably sharks, and whales like Moby Dick. The sea remains one of the last places of mystery, an unfathomed, unfathomable place of endless dark water. We know more about the far reaches of the universe than we do about the truly deep ocean. Mythical creatures of the deep, whether Nessie, or one of various giant specimens hauled unsuspectingly from the ocean, continue to populate the diminishing space of our wonder and fear of the unknown.

So whilst elucidating the psychological benefits of water is certainly helpful, it’s all a bit…tame. Is it just another way of humans turning the wild and numinous into something we now think we understand? Something we can now control and apply in our lives for our own benefit and comfort? Have we demystified the sea? Reducing its mysteries to little more than a balm for our troubled modern minds? A lure for our attention and our debt in an overheated housing market?

In the Christian tradition the sea is a place of profound paradox. Creation begins with God’s Spirit hovering over the water. However, the Hebrew scriptures also present the sea as a place of God’s absence. The sea is the place of monsters and mystery, and death. It’s also the place of perhaps the most famous whale in all literature. The whale that swallows the hapless Jonah. Jonah’s story expresses the deep paradox of the sea as a place of death and yet also a place of divine encounter. It is in the depths of the sea, and the digestive system of the whale, that Jonah’s epiphany takes place and his journey starts anew.

Stories of Jesus also deal with this paradox of wildness and encounter in the chaos of the sea. In the story of the calming of the storm the wild threat of the sea is not rendered as simply something to be avoided. Jesus is not a fixer making all daily dangers obsolete. Rather the story says that it is precisely in such moments of wildness, fury and terror that his powerful presence can be encountered.

To step off the shore and into the sea is to enter the possibility of the death and (paradoxically) the real possibility of deeper life.

It’s for these reasons perhaps that, John Good, a friend of mine, has formed a Christian community that’s based around encounter with the sea. Located as it is in an area almost surrounded by the sea, it started as a social enterprise helping people access the water who otherwise lacked the equipment or resource to do so. Pretty soon it became clear that this was transformational for people. Enabling families otherwise excluded from a life-giving resource to enjoy it as much as anyone else was powerful. One person referred to the experience by saying that on that day the sea had been ‘her saviour.’ Ocean Church began with a gathering on three large, tethered paddleboards some metres offshore. They now run retreats and pilgrimages on the sea, practice centering prayer (a form of Christian meditation or contemplative prayer) on the sea and continue to explore what it means to meet God on the water.

We yearn for the sea, and the water, for more than a balm for the mind. The sea remains that place, in our mechanised, technological world with its constant lure of control and mastery, where an immersion in dangerous mystery can still be experienced. To step off the shore and into the sea is to enter the possibility of the death and (paradoxically) the real possibility of deeper life. To be held buoyant by the sea and look to the horizon is to get it touch with our finitude in the context of the vastness of the seas. It is to engage with our utter dependency on the creation which we inhabit and to connect with the presence that holds that creation together.

To step into the sea is even therefore a step of faith. A step in the direction of our own vulnerability. A brave step away from the world in which our technology, our algorithms, our machines and our skyscrapers dupe us into a faith in our own control, our own supremacy. A step into the depths. ‘Deep calls to deep’ says the psalmist as ‘all your waves and breakers have swept over me.’ As many of us step into the sea this summer it may certainly be a step toward a restored sanity, but it might also be a step toward a restored soul.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now