Willem Dafoe didn’t expect playing Jesus to spark a national firestorm. But when Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ hit theaters in 1988, it was met with boycotts, theater bans and protests so intense Universal was pressured to pull the film entirely.
Speaking at the Sarajevo Film Festival, Dafoe admitted he was “shocked” at how far the outrage spread.
“The campaign was driven by the religious right who needed something to energize their cause,” he said, noting that many of the loudest critics hadn’t even seen the movie.
The protests soon took on an uglier edge.
“Then it morphed into a strange thing about Jews in Hollywood and became an antisemitic thing,” Dafoe recalled. “The perception is that it was the Catholic Church, and it wasn’t the Catholic Church; it was the fundamental right in America that started [it].”
It wasn’t lost on Dafoe how absurd the backlash seemed when compared with what Hollywood was producing at the time.
“In an age of super-violent movies and porn, this is a movie that was trying to address the nature of faith,” he said. “It was a sincere attempt.”
Despite the chaos, Dafoe still calls the role one of his favorites. The stripped-down production style, he explained, made the film feel more authentic.
“We had very little resources, we shot very fast, no money, but that was the way to shoot it because we didn’t get distracted by the spectacle,” he said. “There was a beauty, a grace and simplicity to it.”
