Do we like Jim Caviezel?
Our score: 2 out of 10. He has a run of conspiracy-theory talk and is starring in a jailed ex-president's hero biopic, with very little documented good to set against it.
Caviezel was a proper working actor before the big role. He was in The Thin Red Line in 1998, then played Jesus in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which took over US$600 million and became the highest-grossing religious film ever. Later he fronted the CBS series Person of Interest from 2011 to 2016. In 2006 he also drew controversy for an ad against Missouri's embryonic stem cell research amendment.
He says playing Jesus cost him in Hollywood: “I hadn't done anything wrong. I just played Jesus.” The Passion also copped criticism over alleged antisemitic undertones, which he has pushed back on. In October 2025 it was reported he had dropped out of the sequel, The Resurrection of the Christ, and Gibson was looking for another actor. That report didn't give a reason.
Here's where it turns. The Daily Beast reported in May 2021 that he promoted a QAnon conspiracy theory about harvesting kids' blood while promoting his anti-trafficking film. He had appeared at a right-wing Health and Freedom Conference, which Mike Lindell, Lin Wood and Sidney Powell were reported to have attended. The piece included no response from him.
In July 2023 he was still at it while selling Sound of Freedom. AlterNet reported he talked about “adrenochroming” in his remarks. He also told Fox News that Trump was “the new Moses”, who he said should lead the fight against traffickers. Fighting child trafficking is a good cause. Dressing a conspiracy theory up as the cause is the slide this page watches for.
The company he keeps is the other half. He is playing Jair Bolsonaro in Dark Horse, which Fox News said gives a heroic vision of a man jailed over trying to overturn the 2022 election. The film was written by a former Bolsonaro culture secretary, and Carlos Bolsonaro publicly thanked Caviezel. BBC Brasil reported Flávio Bolsonaro admitted asking a banker for money to cover film sponsorship, and said no money was received; no charges against the film's team were reported.
On the good side, the record is thin, and that's honestly most of it. He has argued the Passion role cost him work, and Sound of Freedom put child trafficking in front of a huge audience. But no charity work or kind acts of his own that we could verify made it past our sources. Nothing about mistreating co-stars turned up either, so good-person is a close call.