Mary Magdalene (2018)

As a girl, Mara was raised Catholic. She attended Sunday school every week and went to Catholic school until sixth grade. She’s since left organized religion, but still had to eradicate her prior impressions of Magdalene before portraying her on screen.

“I had these things in the back of my head I had to let go of and start from scratch,” she says. “I had so much baggage in terms of what I knew about the character and the story. I wanted to go into it with a clean slate.”

Mara and Garth Davis, the director of Mary Magdalene, anticipated this perception of Mary, but they didn’t expect their movie to be controversial for trying to reclaim Magdalene’s story.

“I look at a male-dominated society and the way people have decided to manipulate women in history, and I find that way more controversial than us telling this story,” Davis says.. “Two thousand years and we still haven’t acknowledged this interpretation of Mary Magdalene? I think that’s more controversial than the making of this movie. We’re going to meet resistance, but we have to get these stories out there.”

Mara agrees. She hopes that the movie challenges misunderstandings. “A lot of women I know were moved by it and thankful the movie was made,” she says.

Mara remembers shooting a scene early in the film in which Mary makes the radical choice to leave her home and follow Jesus with the disciples. She walks into the disciples’ camp and stands out right away as the only woman. The men are confused and concerned, even a little intimidated.

“I remember walking up to that group of men and thinking how it would have been absolutely terrifying,” Mara says. “To just go and join this group of men definitely took a lot of bravery. We’ve never seen that world from a female perspective, and I think the male and female perspectives are quite different, certainly during that time. So there’s a lot of value seeing [the story] from a woman’s point of view.”
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“A lot of the issues in the film are certainly relevant and present in 2019, even more so than when we made it (in 2016),” Mara says.
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His movie does not look, feel or sound like other faith-related stories on screen, and that’s the point. He says he wanted to evoke the feeling of “an elegant documentary.”

“I wanted to do a human telling of [this story],” says Davis. “I’m not here to judge [other faith movies], but I don’t relate to them. When I read this script, Jesus wasn’t held above us. He was with the people. I could be on that journey with Him. I didn’t feel like I was being taught a lesson. All these characters have a vulnerability about them, and I think it’s in those vulnerabilities we get close to spiritual truth.”

Mara and the other actors had to strain at times in search of that vulnerability. Instead of a soundstage, Magdalene was shot in places meant to evoke the reality of the period, such as Rome and the canyons of Southern Italy.

For Mara, the tactility helped her become more honest inside the part, her biggest worry going into the role. Despite leaving Catholicism, Mara still considers herself very spiritual, so while it was strange for her to be acting opposite Jesus in the early days of production, the grounded nature of the movie brought her toward a revelation. She dropped her preconceptions about Mary and Jesus and she found her own idea of the truth again.

“I thought it was going to be pretty weird to do some scenes with Jesus,” she says, laughing. “How do you go into that space and make it feel real? But it was cool to let myself be open as I went along and rediscover what I knew about Jesus. I was surprised. It wasn’t dissimilar to the spiritual things I follow and believe in as an adult.”