For Jon Voight, the actor who shot to fame 36 years ago as an aspiring stud in "Midnight Cowboy," playing Pope John Paul was like a personal coming home.
"I've gone through a lot of stuff in my life," Voight said in a telephone interview, adding that as he got older he came to realize ever more "God's importance in our lives."
The 66-year-old Oscar-winner plays the late Pope in a two-part CBS mini-series to be aired in early December in the United States. Voight will show it to Pope Benedict at a special world premiere screening on Thursday night at the Vatican.
Voight, who won an Oscar for best actor playing a handicapped Vietnam veteran in the 1978 film "Coming Home," said his Catholic upbringing helped him get into the role.
"I have to tell you, I had a wonderful time doing the Pope, maybe because I understood more than most what he was since I had a Catholic background," he said.
"I was not intimidated to take this role because I did not have to go to school from scratch to be comfortable with the surroundings of the Church. I'd been there before," he said.
But while nearly all the roles in his long career have been fictional, for this project he faced the challenge of playing perhaps the most filmed and recorded person in history.
"We had so much video on him. I had a lot of DVDs and I watched them again and again. I ingested it and marinated myself in it," he said.
"As an actor, you simply provide the life energy underneath the portrait but you don't write the script ... John Paul wrote the script."
Voight likened his preparing to play John Paul, who died last April after reigning for nearly 27 years, to that of an "amateur anthropologist" digging for clues on behavior, sense of humor, gestures, body language and facial expression.
TOWERING INTELLECT
"I dipped into some of the encyclicals and the speeches. I really needed the behavior more than other things but it was nice to know the size of his intellect and try to get acquainted with that," he said.
Voight said he could not have done the film without having lived a long and sometimes troubled life himself.
"I think I had to live a life (before doing this). For some reason I have had success playing the suffering souls so that the last stages (of the Pope's life) were comfortable for me," Voight said.
He said that looking back on his own life he realized that one of the most important lessons was learning how to use freedom wisely -- one of the late Pope's leitmotivs.
"Free love -- what a poison that was," he said, recalling the 1960s.
"Free love, the destruction of family life and loyalties and the responsibilities of parents, and I've gone through that, so I know ... that balance has to be achieved, you have to understand what freedom really means," he said.
Voight has very strained relations with his daughter, actress Angelina Jolie, who he had by his first marriage. He left his wife when Jolie was less than a year old.
He said he "wanted to do right" by the Pope so he delved into John Paul's ability as a poet, an actor on the world stage, a statesman who helped fell communism in his native Poland and as an old man whose slow slide to death was watched by millions.
"I think he taught people the dignity of life and the dignity going into that last phase, toward death," Voight said.
The four-hour mini-series on CBS, which is owned by Viacom Inc., is one of several television films that have been made since the Pope died. Competing network ABC, which is owned by Walt Disney Co, will air its own series on Dec 1.
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