Bucharest, Romania, Feb 5, 2004 / 22:00 pm
In a recent interview with the Associated Press, actress Maia Morgenstern said she was pregnant for her role as Mary in Mel Gibson’s upcoming feature film “The Passion of the Christ.”
The shoot finished one month ahead of the birth of her now nine-month-old second daughter. Being pregnant created "a special luminosity which you cannot reproduce with makeup," she told AP, Feb. 3.
The Romanian actress, whose grandfather died in the Auschwitz death camp and whose parents are Holocaust survivors, does not consider the film anti-Semitic, nor does she think it will promote anti-Semitism.
The Jewish actress said Muslims, atheists, Christians and Jews worked on the film but race and religion were never an issue, and Gibson never imposed his religious convictions on anyone during the shoot.