I have met Jesus. Appropriately, he is 33 years old. Less suitably, he has short brown hair, strangely slanted green eyes and lacks confidence. He is also profoundly dyslexic and largely deaf. Perhaps anyone would be nervous, having been catapulted from obscurity into playing the Son of God, but Joseph Mawle felt ill-equipped for such a divine part. On the farm in Warwickshire where he grew up, church-going was a Christmas- and Easter-only affair. "My family were Christian but definitely not evangelical," he says, rather overstating, I suspect, his parents' enthusiasm. "Does that make me Mary?" his mother asked, irreverently, when he told her he had been offered the part.
Mawle describes himself as a "humanist" - a careful choice of words designed not to offend, because there are many dangers lurking for the man who plays Jesus. Robert Powell, who starred in Zeffirelli's 1977 film Jesus of Nazareth, said: "You always offend someone, and never live up to someone else's expectations." Seeking guidance on how to play the role, one of Mawle's first ideas was to approach Powell for advice. "I contacted him through his agent, but he never got in touch," he says. Then a minor miracle occurred. "The day I was flying out to Morocco to begin filming, I walked into the toilet at the airport and there he was, washing his hands. I tapped him on the shoulder and told him who I was."
"Oh my God," said Powell (or is that just fanciful?) Then they both stood staring at each other, dumbstruck. "Finally, I asked him if he had any advice and all he said was: 'It's one of the hardest jobs you'll ever do'." That wasn't much help. Not for someone who was already over-awed by the prospect of working alongside more experienced actors. James Nesbitt plays Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, and Ben Daniels is the high priest, Caiaphas, in this even-handed version of the Passion, which makes the "baddies" more sympathetic than usual and upgrades Mary Magdalene from prostitute to widow. But there remain hordes of disciples in beards and droopy robes, among whom Jesus has to stand out.
Powell established Jesus's otherness by never blinking. "If I had tried that," says Mawle, "I would have ended up blinking like a madman." The research was not easy. He read the gospels in six translations, but they weren't as much help as he had hoped. "There's no description of his physical attributes. They just tell the journey and the teachings. I was left with a blank canvas but a vast responsibility, as everyone in the Western world has their own image of him."
Further reading was required - a chore for a man who is so dyslexic that he spent his early teenage years in a boarding school for special needs. "Look, I've got it here," he says, scrabbling in his bag for The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey, which has been his trusty companion this past year. He read it again and again to get under the skin of the Galilean carpenter who lived 2,000 years ago. The thing that stood out for him was a single sentence: "God didn't cheat."
"What I think he meant was that Jesus felt everything a man would feel. He's incredibly human, he expresses fears, anger, lust, love. For me, he not only made the sacrifice of his death but the sacrifice of not having a family. He and Mary Magdalene really loved each other."
The facial hair that made Mawle look like the face on the Turin shroud during filming has long gone. But even cleaned up he has a strange intensity. I can see why Nigel Stafford-Clark, the producer of Bleak House, who cast him, describes him as having "a way of holding your attention". When you talk to him, he watches your face intently, lip-reading. I've been told that he doesn't like to talk about his deafness, but that turns out not to be true. He doesn't want to be seen as a deaf actor, but he doesn't mind talking about being an actor who has overcome a disability. In daily life, he wears two discreet hearing aids, but he takes them off when he's acting because they produce a foggy sound. "It feels more natural not to wear them. I can usually tell when people are about to speak from their quirks and tics - though there have been times when I've had to ask a director to pinch my foot so I know when to come in."
He wasn't so sanguine about the deafness when it first struck at 16. Even before that he was having a difficult time. One of three children, his mother was a teacher and his father a farmer - a background that gives him the distinction, rare among actors, of having tractor-driving as a skill. But being dyslexic made his school life hard. He once played Dick Whittington at primary school but he was "too unconfident" to do more acting there, or at the boarding school he attended from 13 to 16. He won't name it, but he had a "really tough time" there; meanwhile, his parents were splitting up. "The best times were Saturday film nights. I disappeared into those films. I left there a quiet, passionate person who wanted to act."
Mawle left school at 16 to pursue that ambition, but almost immediately got an infection - labyrinthitis - which destroyed the hairs of his inner ears, leaving him 70 per cent hearing-impaired in the upper register and with tinnitus, a constant ringing in the ears. "Deaf. Dyslexic. Give up, man," remarked a helpful friend. "It was a dark time," he says. "I spent a lot of time in the gym, channelling all my angst and aggression into making myself huge. Really, it was a cry for help." At 16 he weighed 13 stone and had only 4 per cent body fat.
Living alone in a caravan in his grandparents' garden, near Stratford-upon-Avon, he felt he had nothing more to lose, so he begged the director of the local college to let him study drama. He worked as a fitness instructor, washed dishes and did some tiny acting parts before he applied to the Bristol Old Vic theatre school, which had recently taken on two blind students. He got a scholarship, but even after voice training his troubles weren't over. He left in 2002 with no agent and worked as an assistant in a special needs school. Life was looking bleak until his disability suddenly became a selling point.
A deaf actor was needed for the lead role in Soundproof, a TV drama. "Everything came from that," he says. Parts in Persuasion, Silent Witness, Foyle's War and Clapham Junction followed. He met a girlfriend in the pub on "deaf night", though he is now single. Then Jesus happened. Stafford-Clark's idea was to make a naturalistic drama about the last week in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. It starts with him buying a donkey on the outskirts of Jerusalem so that he can enter the city riding on it, in accordance with prophecies about the coming of the Messiah. There's a documentary feel to the way the drama unfolds. Pilate is trying to keep this troublesome province under control because it's the trade route to Rome for wealth from Syria. Caiaphas doesn't want trouble. And then Jesus arrives to stir up an already explosive situation.
Filming wasn't much fun. It was boiling hot in the Moroccan desert and Mawle's dyslexia and deafness made learning the lines hard. But it was his disability that, in the end, gave him his way into the part. "I came to see Jesus as a modern man who gave time to everybody. He loved humans, he wanted them to excel. When I first got a taste of religion, I thought it was all don't do this or that. As I learnt more about Jesus, I found he had a more positive message: use your gifts."
That thought gave him courage, but still he was often so nervous that he turned for help to David Oyewolo, who played Henry VI for the RSC and is Joseph of Arimathea in The Passion. "He's straight-down-the-line religious and that was very calming. I was getting mixed up with words and so I asked him what it meant to be humble. He said, 'It means asking for help'." Mawle's humility turned out to be his best qualification for the part.
Further reading: A bold new interpretation of The Passion; Jesus and Judas in one week Holy Week
