Typecast

From: movie poster shop

"Last month, American television audiences were shocked: when Satan showed up in the History Channel’s new mini-series The Bible, he looked strikingly like President Barack Obama. Responses were quick, and they came on all types of media from Twitter and Facebook to CNN and Fox News. Complaints sounded so loudly that the producers of the show were forced to respond, calling it ‘nonsense’ that they purposefully cast the Moroccan actor Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni as Satan to look like Obama. The controversy hasn’t hurt the ratings for the 10-hour series. With more than 10 million people in the US watching each episode, The Bible has been the biggest cable TV hit of the year.
     One of the reasons for its popularity is that Americans care deeply about how biblical figures are represented in the flesh. Whether discussing the darkness (and Obama-ness) of Satan or the ‘sexy whiteness’ of Jesus, the ethnic ‘look’ of the characters has been just as important (if not more so) than what they have said or done on screen.
     This is not the first time US audiences have fixated on the portrayal of Biblical bodies. In 2004, they flocked to movie theatres to watch Jesus tortured and killed in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. In that film, Jesus never spoke English, but his brutalized body was on display front and centre. In previous decades, people asked Martin Luther King Jr what Jesus looked like, and during the 1920s, Americans debated whether it was appropriate to show Jesus in films at all."
— Edward R. Blum, Aeon
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"Jesus has been depicted in art as triumphant, gentle or suffering. Now, in a controversial new sculpture in downtown Toronto, he is shown as homeless — an outcast sleeping on a bench. It takes a moment to see that the slight figure shrouded by a blanket, hauntingly similar to the real homeless who lie on grates and in doorways, is Jesus. It’s the gaping wounds in the feet that reveal the subject, whose face is draped and barely visible, as Jesus the Homeless. Despite [the] message of the sculpture — Jesus identifying with the poorest among us — it was rejected by two prominent Catholic churches, St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

     'Homeless Jesus had no home,' says the artist, Timothy Schmalz, who specializes in religious sculpture. 'How ironic.'"
— Deacon Greg Kandra, Patheos
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You can buy The Bible (Old and New Testament in one edition) here...

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