'Killing Jesus' Star Stephen Moyer Shares His Approach to Playing Pontius Pilate in Exclusive Video
Warning: True Blood fans may have to watch this video twice. The first time, they’ll be distracted admiring Stephen Moyer sporting a tan. The second, they’ll be able to focus on what the actor has to say about portraying Pontius Pilate in National Geographic Channel’s Killing Jesus, premiering March 29.
The three-hour event — the network’s third adaptation of a Bill O’Reilly best-seller after Killing Lincoln and Killing Kennedy — dramatizes the circumstances and perceived threat to power that some believe led to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ (Haaz Sleiman). “You get to see Pilate a little bit behind-the-scenes. It’s not just played out in front of a crowd,” Moyer says of the Roman governor of Jerusalem who decided Jesus’s fate. “I think sometimes when I’ve seen it portrayed, he comes across as weak. We don’t see what other things Caiaphas [high priest of Jerusalem and conspirator in Jesus’s death, played by Rufus Sewell] has got on, what other things Antipas [the tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, played by Eoin Macken] is dealing with, what Pilate is dealing with running a city on a daily basis. And it could quite simply have been that at one moment he’s doing roads and taxes, at another point somebody’s stolen from somebody, and the next one comes in and this one thinks he’s King of the Jews, and it’s just, ‘OK, scourge him. Tax him.’”
As Killing Jesus unfolds, “Caiaphas just keeps pushing and pushing and pushing until finally, Pilate just eventually nods,” Moyer says. “That’s all it takes to create this domino effect of the next 2,000 years. The idea that something like that could be the wellspring for what Christianity became is a fascinating idea, because one would think it would have to be something far bigger. And so I think that, if anything, there is within this script a lot of those kind of subtleties that make it interesting.”
Killing Jesus premieres March 29 at 8 p.m. on National Geographic Channel.
