Harvey Keitel once picked the most important role of his career: “It had a profound effect on me”
Throughout his career, Harvey Keitel has proven his intensity and versatility in the acting profession, which has afforded him a reputation of genuine admiration. Known and loved for his subtle character choices, Keitel has reigned supreme over Hollywood ever since his emergence in the early 1970s.
The number of productions of the highest order of quality with Keitel’s name attached to them often seems endless, but amongst the actor’s most memorable on-screen efforts are the likes of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Barry Levinson’s Bugsy and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.
Aside from Taxi Driver and Mean Streets, Keitel has collaborated with the legendary Martin Scorsese on a further four occasions, and it’s a Scorsese movie that the actor believes provided the most important role of his career, 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, in which Keitel played Judas Iscariot opposite Willem Dafoe as Jesus Christ.
In a 1992 interview with David Morgan, Keitel admitted, “I’m thinking Last Temptation far outweighs any of the other films in terms of its importance.” In fact, Keitel claimed that he finds it “difficult” to even talk about his other legendary performances after recalling Scorsese’s religious epic because of its “far-reaching effect on people.”
Written by Paul Schrader and adapted from Nikos Kazatzakis’ 1955 novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, it tells the story of Jesus Christ and his many prospective temptations, including lust, doubt, and fear. The controversial book the film was based, and the film itself, had detailed Jesus in sexual activity, leading to a widespread indictment by Christian pressure groups.
Still, the backlash the film received – it also earned critical acclaim – did not stop Scorsese’s film from having a “profound effect” on Keitel, who noted, “It sort of came at a time when I was questioning my own approach to knowing who I am, what I am, to knowing about my spiritual side. It sort of opened a door for me to question in a more profound way the Biblical account of our history”.
In fact, The Last Temptation of Christ left such an impression on Keitel that he followed up on his effort in the film by continuing to research the relationship between Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot. “The notion of belief, to believe for instance that Judas for a certain amount of money betrayed Jesus was always something I could not – it did not sit well with me,” he said. “It seemed like something else had to take place.”
Upon further research, Keitel learned that Judas was said to have come from a wealthy family and was not actually in any need of money that would be earned from betraying Jesus. By reading Kazantzakis’ interpretive account of religious history, Keitel found “more sense than anything I had heard or read, and it sort of allowed me to use my imagination more in terms of my own belief about religion.”
While perhaps The Last Temptation of Christ is not the first role with which we associate Keitel, who had grown up in a Jewish family, it certainly played a significant part in his emotional and spiritual life, leaving an eternal mark on his overall conception of the world and the kind of historical events that shaped the major Judeo-Christian religions.
