According to one study, lightning strikes roughly 240,000 people per year. It’s fairly rare, in other words — but in 2003, it happened three times on the set of The Passion of the Christ.
Lead actor Jim Caviezel has claimed he was “lit up like a Christmas tree” while filming the Sermon on the Mount sequence of the film. “I knew it was going to hit me about four seconds before it happened,” the actor told The 700 Club. “I thought, ‘I’m going to get hit.’ And when it happened, I saw the extras grab the ground.”
Caviezel said that after the strike, fire was coming out of his head and his body was illuminated — though the cameras hadn’t yet finished panning over to his position. “By the time the cameras got to me,” Caviezel recalled, “I hear Mel screaming out, ‘What the heck happened to his hair?’ I looked like I went to see Don King’s hair stylist.”