If the popularity and importance of the characters, historical or fictional, which inspire films and TV series were measured by their ability to generate controversy among the public, we would have to assume that we live in an era in which Snow White, the Little Mermaid, Severus Snape/Snape, Queen Charlotte of England and even generic elves and dwarves from Middle Earth are more important than Jesus Christ.

Why don’t we explain the indifference and total lack of indignant reactions and philological – or perhaps better to say exegetical – protests in another way? – which welcomed the news that Mel Gibson has chosen the Finnish Jaakko Ohtonen to play Jesus in Resurrection, the highly anticipated sequel to the cult film (literally) The Passion of the Christ with which Gibson hit the box office in 2004, grossing over 600 million dollars.

Yes, in case you missed it, Mel Gibson started filming Resurrection at Cinecittà and, although initially it seemed that the actors from the first film would be recalled and rejuvenated through very expensive CGI interventions, in the end Jim Caviezel, Monica Bellucci and the others were left at home and replaced with a simpler and cheaper recast.

Among the new names there are Italian celebrities such as Kasia Smutniak and Riccardo Scamarcio, in the roles of Mary and Pontius Pilate respectively, while the American of Irish-Swiss-Slovak origins Caviezel has been replaced by the thirty-six-year-old Finn Jaakko Ohtonen, who will therefore play Christ in the days following the crucifixion, showing his resurrection: nothing more is available at the moment known, except that the film will be released in two parts and on two dates in 2027 chosen for their Christian religious significance.

The attention to fidelity to the evangelical texts is, moreover, a well-known characteristic of the first film, which was even filmed in the Aramaic language.

Evidently, however, Gibson was not afraid of sparking endless media controversy when he chose a Finnish actor, known for playing a Danish warrior in The Last Kingdom, for the part of the son of God born in Palestine two thousand years ago. And he was right; at least at the moment.

Yet precedents suggested the opposite. Moving the Little Mermaid from the North Sea to the Caribbean and consequently choosing a black actress earned Disney a lot of indignation from attentive readers of fairy tales. The same ones who took it out on Disney even more when the part of Snow White was entrusted to an actress who wasn’t white enough like Rachel Zegler and was even less beautiful than the evil queen Gal Gadot.

Rivers of memes were poured onto social media when historical characters such as Netflix’s Queen Charlotte of England were played by actors with a skin that was not respectful of historical reality, and the same happened when beloved literary sagas were touched upon: Prime Video had to respond to Tolkien fans who contested black elves and dwarves in The Rings of Power, and it was enough for the news to leak out that Paapa Essiedu had been chosen for the role of Snape in the new Harry Potter series to force Warner Bros to officially confirm and therefore claim the casting done, in front of millions of people who cited, as a biblical passage, JK Rowling’s description of the hooked nose and yellowish skin of the heroic Hogwarts professor.

In fact, there were signs of climate change a few weeks ago, when Sophie Turner was announced as the new face of videogame heroine Lara Croft in the future Prime Video series: we remembered Lara Croft as darker than the beautiful and very pale star known for Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, but perhaps it was the poorly defined pixels of the 90s or the comparison with the almost “Mediterranean” Angelina Jolie.

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About Ohtonen, however, we don’t know what to say. He is Finnish, by nationality and also by appearance (as you can easily check by browsing his Instagram profile). He played the Dane in The Last Kingdom, the Viking in Vikings: Valhalla, and not as an ethnic character: he actually has Nordic/Scandinavian features. In theory very different from those of the Middle Eastern Jesus. It is true, over the centuries the Lord has been visually represented with very different features, and green or blue eyes have been attributed to him by many more or less well-known painters and artists. But when this was pointed out to defend the freedom to cast television or film roles without obsessively paying attention to the precise skin color of the original characters, the response usually revolved around the fact that in the past it made sense to bring the subjects represented closer to those who observed them, while now it is just “woke crap” to fight against with no holds barred.

But then, let’s repeat, how can we explain the calm that has occurred in recent days around the news of a Finnish Jesus? Does fidelity to the texts, even sacred ones, no longer count in sparking indignation? Does no one consider it a provocation made only to please a certain type of public in defiance of Truth with a capital T? Isn’t there some description in the Gospels from which we understand that Jesus was not blond with light eyes and light skin? No jokes about Chinese Cleopatra, Central African Napoleon or heterosexual Achilles and Patroclus (ah no, there actually wasn’t much controversy about that in Troy’s time, but surely it was because there were no social media)? We cannot believe that Jesus does not trigger the same reactions as a Snow White or a Snape, indeed we are certain that soon everyone will talk about it with a mixture of amusement and scandal. Or maybe not?