Season 6 of The Chosen arrives November 15 on Prime Video, and for the first time since the show began, there’s no easing into what’s coming. This is the season that carries Jesus through His arrest, His trial, and the cross. Dallas Jenkins has been direct about what making it took: the biggest season the production has ever attempted, without a close second, and by his own account during a live production update, the hardest season of his and the cast’s lives.
The scale shows in where they built it. Much of Season 6 was filmed on a constructed replica of first-century Jerusalem on a property in Goshen, Utah, standing in for the city where the Gospels place these final hours. The season’s climax, a feature-length theatrical release titled The Chosen: Crucifixion, is scheduled for spring 2027 and needed its own fundraising push to get there: production announced a $6 million gap it had to close through the Come and See Foundation, the nonprofit arm that has backed the show’s crowd-funded model since its earliest seasons.
The first trailer confirmed what the marketing had been circling for months. It’s graphic. Jonathan Roumie, who has played Jesus since the pilot, and Elizabeth Tabish, as Mary Magdalene, carry a sequence built around the words “Father, forgive them,” delivered with none of the restraint the show has used on hard material before.
The people making it describe the same collision in almost identical language. “We started setting this up at the end of Season 5 when Jesus goes into Gethsemane,” said Tyler Thompson, executive producer and co-writer. “Gethsemane is this place where heaven and earth are sort of grazing each other. The supernatural and the natural are colliding, but also revealing things that we couldn’t see if we were just in the natural world or just in the spiritual world. So there are times where we are peeling back the curtain of what our mortal eyes can see and showing you, the audience, what supernatural eyes are seeing on this stage. But the viewer — we’ve spared you the cold loneliness of that exclusively human experience, and we’re giving you a little bit more of, here’s what else is happening in the cosmos than just some temple guards and some powerful leaders and some torturers.”
Ryan Thompson, also an executive producer and co-writer, put the same shift more simply: “One of the things that The Chosen has set itself apart by doing is making the stories of the gospel so personal, so relatable, so here at ground level, but this season is a real crossroads. Heaven and earth are meeting.” Amber Shawna Williams, who plays Tamar, echoed it in four words: “Heaven and earth collide.”
Dallas Jenkins, who directs, has framed the choice as the biggest swing the show has taken. “Because the crucifixion has been portrayed so many times, in order to do it in a way that’s fresh, we had to take some bold choices, and it’s the biggest risk we’ve taken in the show,” he said. “But I think that it’s also the most important thing that we’ve done. I think it’s a season and a finale that demanded it.”
That restraint is exactly what makes the video below worth sitting with. The Gospel of Matthew doesn’t end the crucifixion with Jesus’s last breath. In the next three verses, it describes the temple curtain tearing in two from top to bottom, an earthquake splitting rock, and tombs opening — with those raised from them, the text says, appearing in Jerusalem after Jesus’s own resurrection. Luke and Mark both record the darkness that fell over the land and the curtain tearing; Matthew alone goes further, into the earthquake and the opened tombs. However the show chooses to stage it, that’s the material Season 6 is walking into: a death scene the Gospels themselves treat as the natural world responding to what just happened.
We haven’t been able to confirm from the production’s public statements exactly how much of that passage from Matthew lands in Season 6 versus how much sets up Season 7, which The Chosen has already confirmed will carry the Resurrection and close out the series. What we can say is that a show built on taking Scripture at its word has now arrived at the one passage where Scripture itself goes supernatural, and a production calling this its hardest and biggest season yet isn’t likely to downplay it.
Here’s the release this piece is built around. Watch it and judge for yourself:
We’ll keep following this as more of Season 6 reaches daylight. If you’ve seen something in the full release that confirms more than what’s in the trailer, we want to hear about it.