The Book of Clarence: movie offers a sceptical, comedic take on biblical story of the lead-up to Jesus’ crucifixion through the eyes of fictional Clarence

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Uploaded: 2024-01-14T08:15:16.000Z
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His brother is an apostle but he’s a sceptic with a comedic air – meet Clarence, the fictional main character in retelling of the lead-up to Jesus’ crucifixion

Clarence, says LaKeith Stanfield, who plays him in new movie The Book of Clarence, is ‘a regular guy who happened to be around in the time of Jesus’

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Alfre Woodard as Mother Mary and LaKeith Stanfield as Clarence in “The Book of Clarence” (2023). In the film by black Western “The Harder They Fall” director Jeymes Samuel, Clarence is a sceptical, comedic figure during the lead-up to Jesus’ crucifixion. Photo: Legendary Entertainment

Tribune News Service

Published: 4:15pm, 14 Jan 2024

Hollywood used to love the big biblical epic movie back in the 1950s and 1960s, with classics such as Ben Hur, Spartacus and The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Jeymes Samuel, a 34-year-old British musician and producer whose breakthrough film was the 2021 Western The Harder They Fall, loved these movies and missed them.

“But even watching those movies, they never resembled the world I grew up in,” says Samuels. “Bible stories are all about the hood, people from the land of the have-nots. I just didn’t know anyone who looked like Charlton Heston or Marlon Brando.”

So Samuel created The Book of Clarence, an unusual take on the weeks leading up to Jesus’ crucifixion, featuring an entirely fictional yet complicated character named Clarence.

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A sceptic of Jesus with a comedic air about him, Clarence is played by Oscar-nominated actor LaKeith Stanfield.