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Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Randall Wallace said a conversation he had with Mel Gibson about making a sequel to "The Passion of the Christ" came with an unexpected warning: "Satan's going to come after you."
Wallace, 76, shared the story during an appearance on Raymond Arroyo’s Arroyo Grande podcast in an episode released on July 15.
Wallace, Gibson and Gibson’s brother, Donal Gibson, teamed up to write “The Resurrection of the Christ,” the sequel to Gibson’s 2004 biblical drama “The Passion of the Christ,” which chronicles the final hours of Jesus and His crucifixion.
The screenwriter said he approached Gibson about developing a film on the Resurrection while the two were promoting 2016's "Hacksaw Ridge."
“Having studied the Resurrection and being so consumed by it, I thought about it many times,” Wallace recalled. “I didn’t have anything to do with ‘The Passion of the Christ.’ When we were promoting ‘Hacksaw Ridge,’ we were sitting there talking about our lives, and I said, ‘Look, you know, the story that you really need to tell is the Resurrection,’” the screenwriter added.
Wallace said there was a long pause before Gibson responded with something "profoundly beautiful."
"He said, 'If we do this, it can't be for the money, and it can't be to get back at people that have hated us or wronged us or been unhappy with us.' And I said, 'Amen to that,'" Wallace recalled.
“Then [Gibson] said, ‘You know, Satan’s going to come after you,’” he continued.
Wallace recalled jokingly replying, "Well, you know, Satan doesn't really care about Baptists. It's really good when Satan can get a Catholic. We're a dime a dozen."
The screenwriter acknowledged that he was being facetious at the time, though he admitted the thought stuck with him.
When Arroyo asked, "What if he's right?" Wallace replied, "Well, yeah," adding that the exchange led to "a beautiful conversation about grace."
Arroyo then suggested Wallace might've also been wondering whether Gibson’s warning might prove true.
That conversation, Wallace said, marked the start of their collaboration on the script. “I knew he had written ‘The Passion,’ was very much deeply involved in the writing of it,” Wallace said. “And I said, ‘Look, let’s partner up. I’ll write a draft, give it to you, then we’ll start tearing it up, go through it. You do your thing, I’ll do mine. We’ll work together, we’ll work apart.’ So we started that way.”
The project is not the first time that Wallace and Gibson have worked together. The pair previously collaborated on the Oscar-winning 1995 epic historical drama “Braveheart,” the 2002 Vietnam War movie “We Were Soldiers” and the 2016 World War II film “Hacksaw Ridge.”
The sequel has undergone scheduling changes since it was first announced.
“The Resurrection of the Christ: Part One” had originally been scheduled for release in March 2026, but its theatrical debut has been pushed to May 6, 2027, according to Variety. The second installment is scheduled to arrive in theaters on May 25, 2028.
The sequel to Gibson’s 2004 biblical drama revisits the story of Jesus Christ following the crucifixion, focusing on the events surrounding the Resurrection.
Actor Jaakko Ohtonen plays Jesus in the sequel, replacing Jim Caviezel, who portrayed Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ.” The ensemble also includes Mariela Garriga as Mary Magdalene, Pier Luigi Pasino as Peter, Kasia Smutniak as Mary, Riccardo Scamarcio as Pontius Pilate and Rupert Everett in a supporting role.
“It made sense to recast the whole film,” a source close to the production previously told Variety. “They would have had to do all this CGI stuff — de-aging and all that — that would have been very costly.”
