Yesterday, we reported on a news story that made a whole ton of sense from one angle, while being kind of baffling from another: Fox News announcing that it was leaning more heavily into faith-based material for its Fox Nation subscription service, including a podcast based on the life of Christ. (So far, so 2025.) Where things got a little weird with the story was just how incredibly good the cast for this project, which would be fronted by Fox News correspondent Ainsley Earhardt, would be. How the hell did a Fox News subscription podcast get Brian Cox, Sean Astin, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell, and Kristen Bell to star as its major Biblical figures?
It turns out that the ranks of people asking this question this week include Bell herself, who was apparently shocked to learn that she was the voice of Mary Magdalene in Fox News Media’s “new” The Life Of Jesus. “New” in quotes, because it turns out that this much-touted project is not, in fact, a newly recorded podcast, but something that’s been cobbled together from an earlier audiobook that Bell and others recorded fully 15 years ago, and then forgot about. Per Rolling Stone, Bell was “blindsided” when she learned that her name and voice were being used to promote the project, which she worked on as The Truth And Life Dramatized Audio Bible, originally released back in 2010. The first the actress heard about that audio being transformed into a podcast was earlier this week, when Fox News apparently reached out to see whether she might like to book an appearance on Fox & Friends to celebrate her “new” “gig.”
Bell’s reps note that she didn’t give permission for her work to be repurposed in this way, although it’s not clear whether that’ll have any legal bearing. (Fox Nation’s Fox Faith apparently licensed the book’s audio from one of the audiobook’s original producers.) Rolling Stone also quotes a document indicating that folks at Fox might be aware that they’d get blowback for rolling out a 15-year-old audiobook as “new premium content,” saying that they asked at least one of the celebrity participants to “not mention that this audio New Testament Bible was produced years ago, we’d like it to feel like something that was produced more recently.”
