As her acting career rebounded, so did her faith. “For many years, I really dismissed religion,” says Tabish. “Then booking this role, I have this re
As her acting career rebounded, so did her faith. “For many years, I really dismissed religion,” says Tabish. “Then booking this role, I have this renewed appreciation for who Jesus is and what he was actually teaching everyone—which is taking care of each other, loving your enemy, and letting go of your ego. It’s also made me realize sometimes going to church and calling yourself Christian is a really easy thing to do. But actually practicing what Jesus is teaching is very difficult.”
After being saved by Jesus in The Chosen’s first season, Mary backslides into temptation during the second, telling Christ that she can’t live up to his redemption. Offscreen, Tabish felt similarly unmoored. “I had done the role for a season, and then this next season there were all these emotional scenes. I don’t think I’m good enough as an actress to carry this,” she recalls thinking. “In the scene, Jesus says to her, ‘Just start with your heart.’ That bit of advice has stuck with me.”
While playing a savior on TV, Roumie has met the Pope twice; the actor says he’s often asked to baptize, marry, or even hear confession from fans. “I think Jesus—” Tabish says, then corrects herself with a laugh—“Jonathan, because he plays Jesus, has the most intense fan interactions.” But Tabish hears her fair share of testimony. “A lot of women have shared their own personal stories of struggling with trauma and sexual assault and feeling seen by the way [Mary is] portrayed,” she says. “Just because something traumatic has happened to you, doesn’t mean that that’s what you have to focus on in your life. Mary represents this opportunity to use it as a strength to recognize pain in others.”
For the show’s first few seasons, Tabish tried to emulate Mary in her own life, eager to be all things to all people. “Whoever I was interacting with, whatever they asked me, I kind of said whatever I thought they wanted to hear, did whatever I thought they wanted me to do,” she says. “And that’s a very strange way of dying spiritually and psychologically. When you get to that bottom point where it feels as if you have died, that’s when it was time to come back to myself and stop being so afraid of people not liking me.”
So Tabish did. Creating a boundary between herself and Mary Magdalene has been “the healthiest thing I could do,” she says. But like the stars of Yellowstone, who are asked to speak for the conservative politics projected upon their show, the stars of The Chosen have made an implicit agreement to discuss religion. “Your relationship with God is a sacred thing. Sometimes it doesn’t feel right to talk about them in the context of a TV show that we’re promoting,” says Tabish.
Although that may come easier to some than others. Roumie’s sit-down with Carlson, for instance, was sponsored by a prayer app endorsed by Chris Pratt and Mark Wahlberg. “We’ve all had to learn together how to navigate this because some people are really comfortable talking about their faith. Some people aren’t. Some don’t have any faith,” Tabish says. “I am a Christian, but I don’t necessarily agree with certain things in organized religion. I’m always nervous to say that, because will they come after me with pitchforks and burn me at the stake? I don’t know.”
As is true of most Biblical projects, The Chosen is largely fronted by a group of men. But Tabish is quick to note the importance of women in actual scripture. “You go back to the gospels and see the way Jesus treated women—he had such respect for and also trusted them in these really pivotal moments of his ministry. He protects the adulterous woman, who everyone’s about to throw stones at, and reminds everyone that they are not without sin,” she says. “There is a love for women in Jesus’s story that the show has done a commendable job of portraying.”
But true to her recent credo, she doesn’t mince words about the patriarchal structure of show business. “As a woman who has produced my own work, you can’t help but experience this imbalance and dismissiveness,” Tabish says. “This industry is so male-dominated, and women are treated like a minority. It’s not up to men to necessarily fix that gap. They’re probably not going to because they’re not thinking about that. I don’t necessarily want to be equal to men—I want my own value. And it’s up to us to set our own place at the table.”
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