Brian Deacon

The Casting of the Nine Hundred Candidates

Nine hundred actors went through the casting auditions before him. In 1979, producer John Heyman was looking for a face that wouldn't remind audiences of the big stars of California. Brian Deacon was 30 years old and had solid theater training at the Oxford Youth Theatre. He wasn't a religious man, but he ended up starring in the most translated film in the history of cinema.

Filming of Jesus took place on real locations in Israel over seven months. Deacon chose to isolate himself from the rest of the cast in a hotel to maintain physical and emotional distance from his co-stars. That decision helped him build a restrained performance that avoided the histrionics typical of the Bible epics of the era.

The film has been dubbed into more than two thousand languages since its original release.

But the weight of that role was a heavy burden to shake off in the years that followed. Although the film worked as a mass-outreach tool in international markets, Deacon's face became tied to a divine image. So the actor had to seek refuge in projects that would radically break away from that visual purity.

Peter Greenaway's Symmetry

In 1985, the chance came to break away from religious stories. Peter Greenaway cast him in A Zed & Two Noughts, a work loaded with symbolism, symmetry and a suffocating visual aesthetic. Deacon played Oswald Deuce in a plot revolving around loss and an obsession with biological decay.

It was a complete change of pace.

Working with Greenaway meant submitting to meticulous technical control, where the actor is almost one more decorative element within the frame. Deacon showed he could handle complex dialogue and absurd situations without losing his composure. On this shoot, he crossed paths with his brother Eric Deacon, and the two played twins in a story that is still studied in art schools today for its color composition.

Before this project, he had already appeared in The Triple Echo in 1972 alongside Glenda Jackson. There, he played a deserter soldier who disguises himself as a woman to hide out on a farm. Despite his serene image, Deacon always sought out characters with psychological edges or identity conflicts that moved him away from the conventional leading man.

Refuge in Television and Voice Work

British television became his natural habitat in the decades that followed. In 1992, he joined the cast of Emmerdale for a brief but intense stint. He took part in genre productions such as The Feathered Serpent and appeared in long-running titles such as Doctors and Casualty.

And he never gave up theater.

In 2021, he lent his voice to the animated project The First Easter, reprising the role that made him world-famous decades earlier. This time the work was focused entirely on the recording booth, for a production aimed at digital platforms. Deacon has maintained an ongoing relationship with the Jesus Film Project to update the audio tracks of the original 1979 work.

His career isn't measured by major awards at top-tier festivals or by million-dollar studio contracts in Los Angeles. It's defined by staying power in an industry that tends to forget quickly those who don't feed the media buzz. Deacon chose a discreet private life in the UK, far from the spotlight of the gossip magazines.

1979's original contract included a conduct clause that barred him from appearing in projects that could damage the character's public image during the initial promotional period. In 2024, Peter Sykes's film still racks up millions of views each year in rural areas of Africa and Asia through portable projectors. The final budget for that production was 6 million dollars.