On ‘The Chosen’ set, Utah plays the part of Jerusalem, and fans become extras in Jesus’ story

Goshen • The townsfolk of Jerusalem rest in the shade of pillars, dressed in woven cloth to protect against the harsh sun and the desert sand — both of which are plentiful on this windy afternoon.

Most are carrying a bag over one shoulder. Inside those bags are water bottles and eyeglasses and other 21st-century items they’re not supposed to be seen with.

Some 600 people have gathered in this southwestern Utah County back lot to be background extras in “The Chosen” — the popular TV series that for five seasons has depicted the life of Jesus Christ and the people around him in the Holy Land, in the first century A.D.

Season 5, which screened in movie theaters earlier this year and starts streaming on Prime on June 15, ended with Jesus being betrayed by Judas and arrested by the Romans.

The production came to Goshen for three weeks in May to shoot parts of Season 6, which is expected to be released sometime in 2026. The rest will be filmed at the production’s headquarters, in studios outside Dallas.

All eight episodes of Season 6 happen over 24 hours — showing Christ’s trial before Pilate, Peter’s denial of Jesus, Judas’ guilt over turning Jesus in to the authorities and, in the season finale, the crucifixion. The seventh and final season will cover Jesus’ resurrection and what happened next.

The 600 extras are fans of the show who paid their own way to get to Utah, coming from far and near to be part of a TV series that moves them like no other.

Fans “just want to be a part of it,” said B.J. Forman, the production’s art department coordinator. “They want to help it thrive, and let us tell the story.”

Forman said he has attended fan events — including one called ChosenCon — and “every conversation starts with ‘Thank you’ … for bringing this world to the rest of the world.”

Carl Phillips came from Delta Junction, Alaska, a couple of hours southeast of Fairbanks, where he recently retired as a civil service electrician. He is soon to start another job, and taking part in “The Chosen” was an opportunity for “a little bit of a break” between gigs.

“The Chosen,” said Phillips, a Southern Baptist, is worthwhile because “I just believe that they’ve stayed very close to what the Scripture teaches, the message it’s conveying.”

Orem resident Debbie Eyre said she and a friend have been extras three times. “It’s worth the sweat, because it’s a gift to be here,” she said. “It’s a blessing.”

“It’s so real,” said Eyre, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She credited Dallas Jenkins, the show’s creator, director and main writer, for managing “to make the people of that time real, so we can relate to them. It brings the savior into your life more than anything I’ve ever experienced before.”

Eyre said the show has changed her life — a sentiment Jenkins said he has heard from fans around the world.

“There’s the Christ in the Bible,” Eyre said. “Here, he’s a real person. He’s playing with the children, he’s cracking jokes.”

Finding Jerusalem in Utah

On this morning of filming, Jesus — or rather, actor Jonathan Roumie, who plays him — is not in view. In the center of the massive Jerusalem set, the action is concentrated on a space outside the temple doors.

“Are you lost?” a man asks a small group of Jesus’ followers. The man, according to the script an assistant director is holding on a clipboard, is Zebadiah, one of the Pharisees, a group of Jewish leaders who felt threatened by Jesus’ growing popularity. In the scene, Zebadiah, played by Brad Culver, is explaining to a few of Jesus’ followers why he was arrested: “He was dangerous.”

Around the massive set, most of the extras can’t hear what’s happening. A few mill about in the background, as instructed. The rest sit and wait, a common activity on film sets as crews set cameras and lighting in place for the next shot.

In the center of it all is Jenkins, a tall man in a maroon “The Chosen” T-shirt, who has directed every episode of the series. He runs the scene a couple of times, without stopping. When he’s satisfied, he says, “Cut” — and there’s a smattering of applause from the crew.

Then it’s on to the next shot, and the assistant directors start corralling the extras into place for a large crowd scene.

The 600 background extras provide their own costumes and hand props, Forman said. The production has written a handbook that “gives them the parameters” of the costumes, he said, and “90% of the time, they follow it.”

Once the extras are in place, there’s an announcement: It’s time for lunch. The extras are told to remember where they were sitting, and come back to that spot after they eat.

The extras start walking up the slight incline out of the Jerusalem set. With their desert gear, the scene looks like something out of “The Ten Commandments,” when the Israelites reach the other side of the Red Sea. That is, if Moses had a row of portable toilets and a catering crew waiting for his people.

Getting the look right

During the meal break, Forman shows some visitors around the set. He acknowledges that the set — built by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to make videos depicting scenes from the Bible and the Book of Mormon — is made to be impressive.

“We keep coming back here because it’s such a beautiful Jerusalem space,” Forman said. “It’s got the scale; it’s got the scope.”

It’s also versatile. “A lot of times, we’re using spaces multiple times,” Forman said. “There was actually a day [during this shoot] where one area played as two different scenes, and we had lunch to switch it over. … It was a construction site, so there were lots and lots of cedar poles made into scaffolding. … And a couple of hours later, it was a marketplace.”

In addition to coordinating the work of the art department, Forman has a particular assignment on the set. “I’m the only Jew on the crew,” he said. Because of that, he’s the crew member who writes anything in Hebrew seen in the show. If a character has to write in Hebrew on camera, Forman coaches the actor in drawing the letters so they look authentic.

“All those years of Hebrew school paid off,” he said.

One of the challenges of making “The Chosen,” Forman said, is dealing with the audience’s ideas of how a biblical story should look.

“There are some things you do to make it family-friendly,” Forman said. “We have to make sure that everybody can still watch it.” That’s a contrast to one of the most watched recent movie depictions of Jesus’ life and death: Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” which was noteworthy for its R-rated bloodshed.

Also, Forman said, “there are some things that you have to do because it’s expected.” The creative team is up against more than a century of film versions of Jesus’ story and two millennia of artwork.

As one example of how the show deals with those expectations, Forman cites the Season 5 depiction of the Last Supper, when Jesus shares bread and wine with his apostles — and tells them they are his body and blood.

“Everybody associates that with da Vinci’s painting, with them sitting 13 across at a table for 26,” Forman said. Early in the season, he said, “we had a banquet that was set up at a similar three-sided table, so we gave the audience that vocabulary. They didn’t realize that we gave it to them early. … The actual Last Supper [scene] was more close-in, like a group of friends.”

Jenkins also cites the Last Supper scene as an example of how he has approached the entire story.

“It wasn’t just a painting of people sitting around eating bread,” Jenkins said. “It was an opportunity for close friends and brothers to be together in the last moments, before Jesus would be arrested.”

Jesus between the verses

As the extras trickle back to work after lunch, Jenkins is inside the temple part of the Goshen set with a couple of his actors, rehearsing a scene to be shot later on a flight of stairs.

A couple of the actors are dressed as Pharisees. The actor at the bottom of the stairs is Luke Dimyan, who was introduced at the end of Season 2 as Judas Iscariot, the apostle who ultimately betrays Jesus to the Romans.

From a distance, it isn’t easy to see what scene Jenkins is leading the actors through. Then a sound — a small bag hitting the ground, with coins inside clinking — echoes off the walls, telling everyone paying attention that the actors are walking through the moment when Judas tries to give back the 30 pieces of silver he’s been paid.

“The moment of Judas returning the money is an iconic moment,” Jenkins said during a brief set break. “We take the scripture and expand upon what might have been said around those Bible verses.”

Many times when the story of Jesus is told, Jenkins said, “it goes from verse to verse, miracle to miracle, and there’s no in-between. There’s none of the human elements that we know would have happened, but they weren’t recorded.” That’s what Jenkins said he aimed to bring to “The Chosen.”

“We’re not only showing Judas betray Jesus,” Jenkins said. “We’re showing what it was like for Judas to have to look Jesus’ mother in the eye, for Jesus’ mother to see Judas after it happened. … What they must have been like, and what they must have talked about in between those Bible verses, shows you the intimacy that Jesus would have experienced with his friends, and even with his enemies.”

Few movie or TV depictions of Jesus’ story have achieved that kind of intimacy, Jenkins said, because they condense the plot within two or three hours. The one exception he could recall was Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth,” which ran more than six hours (or eight hours with commercials).

“When I saw it as a kid, it had a profound impact on me,” Jenkins said. “When I saw it again several years ago — obviously, some differences between what [Zeffirelli] did and what I’m doing — I was struck [that] there was a lot of those in-between moments as well. They did explore what it was like for the disciples to be joined by a tax collector [Matthew]. They did explore some of that cultural context that sometimes we miss in those shorter movies.”

In religious movies and religious art, Jenkins said, “Jesus is portrayed as very pious. Sometimes, in art, there’s a halo around his head, or he’s a stained-glass window, or he’s a statue. I always wanted to remind others, because I felt this myself, that Jesus is not a stained-glass window. He is not a statue. Yes, he is God, but he was also a man and experienced what we experienced.”

Depicting Jesus’ humanity, Jenkins said, “doesn’t detract from his divinity. I actually think it enhances it and makes it even more beautiful that we believe the creator of the universe actually walked among us.”