Act of passion

Poor James Caviezel. The actor whose religious beliefs previously generated only mild bemusement - such as when he refused to do nude scenes with Jennifer Lopez in

In The Passion Of The Christ, Mel Gibson's contentious labour of love about the agonising last 12 hours of Christ's life, Caviezel's Jesus suffers levels of violence that many have deemed excessive. And, in the absence of the fervent Gibson, the equally devout Catholic Caviezel is also obliged to suffer questions about the film's alleged anti-Semitism, its doctrinaire conservatism, even its commercial success - this project that nobody wanted to finance has taken $264 million in North America since opening on Ash Wednesday and is expected to bring Gibson an eventual $350 million return on his personal $30 million investment.

Caviezel, 35, sighs, as he prepares to defend the film and his extraordinary portrayal of Jesus. 'If we were telling the truth about this guy, then it should cause controversy,' he says. 'Because he is controversial and he was killed for that.'

To the accusation that Gibson is making money from religious extremists flocking to see The Passion (and purchasing the souvenir crucifixion nails afterwards), Caviezel gives a carefully measured answer. 'Do you have to be religious to see this? Of course not. I believe this film is for all people for all time.'

Answering the charge that the film is excessively violent (one US critic described it as 'like watching Lennox Lewis punch a quadriplegic for two hours'), especially given that children accompanied by adults have been able to see it in the US, the actor gets positively heated.

'Do you think the brutality in Schindler's List is necessary?' he says with vehemence. 'Is it necessary to show that much violence in Saving Private Ryan, as a means to get across to the world what war is really like? You have to show what really happened or why even go there? I'm not interested in making a watered-down version of something.'

Caviezel's mention of Schindler's List may be calculated. Perhaps the most damning allegation still clinging to The Passion is that it promotes anti-Semitism. This rumour dogged the production before filming even began, and was fuelled by claims from Frank Rich of the New York Times, among others, that Gibson's father, Hutton, is a Holocaust denier. Gibson's rather unChristian riposte to Rich was, 'I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick.'

The debate now centres on Gibson's decision to excise a line spoken by the Jewish high priest Caiaphas - 'His blood be on us and on our children' - from the English subtitles, but not from the Aramaic dialogue. On this subject, Caviezel becomes almost messianic.

'Mel didn't want people to focus on that and for it to take them out of the rest of the story,' he says. 'That line does not condemn an entire race for the death of Christ. It doesn't condemn an entire race any more than the heinous actions of Mussolini condemned all Italians or the heinous acts of Stalin condemned all Russians.'

His blue eyes - they were digitally 'corrected' to brown for the film - are blazing now. 'It's against my faith to be anti-Semitic or racist. It's a mortal sin. I don't want to die with mortal sin, so I couldn't make a film like that and I wouldn't.' Usually he prefers not to talk about his faith. ('If I'm a builder working on your house, I don't say I'm a Catholic builder, I just do good work.') But Caviezel knows that he and his beliefs are now in the spotlight.