Miles Teller is denying rumors that he’s been in talks to join the Martin Scorsese Jesus Club, an august body whose current membership pretty much starts and stops at Willem Dafoe. Teller was at the premiere for his new action movie The Gorge—in which, as far as we can tell, he plays the son of absolutely zero (0) gods—when Variety asked him about rumors floating around last year that Scorsese was eyeing him to play a modern, updated Christ for his long-in-the-works The Life Of Jesus. Teller’s response was a vocal expression we can only bring ourselves to write out as “No-o-o-o-o,” adding that, when he saw those same reports, he called his agent to make sure they hadn’t missed a call from Scorsese somehow.
Scorsese’s planned film, based on a book by Shūsaku Endō (who also wrote the book that Silence was based on) was reportedly put on hold last year, over concerns about how planet-spanning the director’s plans for the movie were. (He also halted a long-gestating Frank Sinatra biopic at the same time.) But that hasn’t stopped questions about Teller’s potential casting from floating around (or the possibility of a reunion between Scorsese and Silence‘s Andrew Garfield, also rumored to be in the running). Teller joked, in his red carpet interview, about how there aren’t many roles much more daunting than playing Christ—although he also didn’t go so far as to deny that he might be interested in the role were Scorsese to offer it to him. “I think any actor, if Martin Scorsese offers you something, you say ‘Yes,’ and I’ll figure it out,” he noted. But he also made it clear that nobody from the director’s camp has reached out about the part. (Meanwhile, he only has to deny it two more times to put himself in the automatic running for a part as St. Peter. That’s a Sunday School joke, hey-o!)
Scorsese’s last feature was 2023’s Killers Of The Flower Moon. The Life Of Jesus—which would have been a pretty atypical modern Scorsese movie, clocking in at a svelte 80 minutes—was originally supposed to begin filming this fall.
