- Willem Dafoe says he was “shocked” by the backlash to The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988.
- The actor, who played Jesus in the movie, recalled the controversy snowballing into “an antisemitic thing.”
- Dafoe said that the film was “too scandalous for people” who he doesn’t believe actually watched the movie.
Willem Dafoe is reflecting on his controversial turn as a carpenter from Nazareth.
During a career retrospective at the Sarajevo Film Festival, the Florida Project star discussed the backlash to his 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ 1955 novel of the same name that cast Dafoe as Jesus Christ.
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Dafoe said he was “shocked” by the controversy that the film generated as a result of its explicit content (per The Hollywood Reporter). “Jesus rejects his job and lives as a normal man,” the actor said of the film, which depicts Christ contemplating rejecting his messianic duties to pursue a mortal life with Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey). “He has children, he has sex. That was too scandalous for people, so even without seeing the movie, there were huge protests against it.”
The Poor Things star said that the backlash to the movie then “morphed into a very strange thing about Jews in Hollywood” at a certain point. “It became an antisemitic thing, and it snowballed,” he said. “And the perception is that it was the Catholic Church. It really wasn’t the Catholic Church. It was the fundamental right in America that started this, and then it spread to various places.”
Around the time of the film’s release in 1988, the Los Angeles Times reported that Jerry Falwell opined that the film would “create a wave of anti-Semitism in this country” due to moviegoers blaming Universal Studios’ “Jewish leaders” for the movie’s depiction of Christ.
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that Archbishop Roger M. Mahoney said that protestant attacks on Last Temptation had “anti-Semitic implications,” and Rev. R. L. Hymers Jr. argued that the film’s release “will throw gasoline on the fires of racial bigotry.”
At the Sarajevo Film Festival, Dafoe explained his surprise at the multifaceted controversy that surrounded the film.
“I was shocked, because in an age of super-violent movies and porn and all kinds of movies, this is a movie that was trying to address itself to the nature of faith,” he said. “It was a drag, because it was a movie that I was very invested in, in my mind.”
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The Last Temptation of Christ also starred Harvey Keitel as Judas Iscariot, David Bowie as Pontius Pilate, and Harry Dean Stanton as Paul. The film earned Scorsese an Oscar nomination for Best Director.
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Dafoe previously discussed his memories of Last Temptation in a conversation with Entertainment Weekly to commemorate the film’s 30th anniversary in 2018.
“This was the strongest reaction to any film that I’ve been in, that I can think of,” he said at the time. “Movie releases are so strange because you deeply feel that how movies are received, or how they’re marketed, has so many factors — everything from what’s in the news to what happens to the people in the movies. They’re not judged solely on the content, there’s nothing objective.”
