catholicsphere

Anne Rice thinks he’d make a great Jesus “Strong. Beautiful. Edgy. Soulful eyes. A graceful person but not effeminate. Roguish yet strangely wise. Yes, Depp as Jesus — I can see it.”

In the interview, Rice speaks about her book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, “which chronicles Jesus’ life”. She hopes to develop a television series for HBO.

But, isn’t this the same Anne Rice who wrote “Interview with a Vampire” and a slew of other vampire stories? Yes, one in the same. So, what’s up?

Jesus is on Anne Rice’s mind these days, not just as a novel or a television series but as Lord and savior, the embodiment of a faith she abandoned as a college girl and has since returned to, transformed.

Rice was raised Catholic … abandoned the faith in college, and now, 40 years later, has returned. She attends Mary, Star of the Sea Catholic Church in La Jolla, Calif.

Rice is a fan of Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” and says claims by critics that it is the “most violent film ever made” are ridiculous.

“I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘You haven’t seen “The Last of the Mohicans”? You didn’t get dragged to a Freddy Krueger movie by your 11-year-old son, like I did?’ I was hiding under the seats while he’s sitting there eating popcorn as Freddy murders people,” she says, laughing. “The most violent movie ever made? Come on. Do kids really wake up in the middle of the night screaming that they’re afraid of Roman soldiers?”

Interesting.

And the word is that this book from the author of “The Vampire Chronicles” is a faithful account of Jesus, even if it is a work of fiction about Jesus’ childhood in Egypt, starting when he was 7-years old. She studied and searched, and even rejected the novelties of modernist historians of the 20th centur, calling their theories “a joke”.

Rice didn’t want to reinvent Jesus as something that he wasn’t. Her Jesus would have to be historically and theologically accurate.

“Anybody could write a book about him being a liberal, homosexual, married guy with three lovers,” she says. So she studied and studied and consulted with experts, theologians and clergy, and studied some more — for three years. “It was the most thrilling experience,” she says, “because everything in my devotional life and everything in my creative life, my professional life and my personal life was all one.