Click here to watch The Passion trailer

The Passion, BBC1’s ambitious new account of the last days of Jesus Christ, finds Joseph Mawle nailed to the cross like many a sinewy actor before him. Faster, however, than you can say “30 pieces of silver”, Mawle will be returning to Jerusalem AD33 in a different guise. At the Almeida, in a revisionist new play by Stephen Adly Guirgis, he takes the title role in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.

Jesus and Judas in one Holy Week? Surely the cosmic casting director in the sky is having some kind of a laugh? “It’s quite an interesting combination,” Mawle allows. “It was not planned, obviously.” A smile plays uncertainly on his lips. A few weeks into rehearsal, he is still finding out about Judas. Guirgis, in the vanguard of a new wave of Off-Broadway playwrights, has brought Christ’s betrayer to contemporary Manhattan to stand trial. “He’s wrestling with what he is,” says Mawle, “with what people believe he’s become, with what he really believes he’s become.” As for Jesus, they always say playing the good guys’ good guy is the thespian’s short straw. Extensive reading has persuaded Mawle to draw on personal experience: “I am a human and get scared; I feel lust, I feel love; I want to be better; I want people to be happy. I also would like to take out a few people. I’m normal.”

He is, and he isn’t. His hair, which flops lankly over his aquiline features in The Passion, is swept back behind his ears. We are in a north London cafe nominated by him because it is close to rehearsals. It’s a singularly bad choice. Canned music pipes from speakers overhead, requiring Mawle to tinker discreetly with the volume control on small digital hearing aids planted in each ear. At the age of 16, he contracted labyrinthitis, an airborne virus that damaged his inner ear and deprived him of 80% of his hearing. You’d never know it to listen to him. At 33, he seems entirely at peace with his invisible disability.

“You’re putting something in your ear that blocks out what you have left naturally of your own hearing anyway, so you really are depending on a machine to hear. It’s slightly cyborgish. I’m sufficiently used to it. If I can’t hear, then I’ll just relax and stop trying.” This beatific attitude to social isolation may even have been to his advantage in taking on two characters from the gospels who are united in their separate-ness from the common herd.

“They’re both very isolated characters,” he says. “Ultimately, anybody’s life experience helps. Whatever you have is going to help because that’s all you have to bring. The script of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot even calls him a ‘deaf motherf***er’.”

It was Mawle’s particular affliction that first catapulted him into a lead role on television. In 2005, the hunt for an actor to play the lead in Soundproof, a drama in which a deaf man who communicates by sign language is wrongly accused of murder, had seen hundreds of actors pass through auditions. Mawle heard about it through a friend and, after devoting two weeks to preparing for the exhaustive interview process, landed the part.

“I gave up all other work at the risk of being completely unemployed for the whole of the summer. But I thought, ‘I’ve got to dive in.’ I so badly wanted to be an actor for a long time, and this was a very big opportunity.”

The story of most actors’ journey into the profession includes only minor variations. Mawle walked an altogether rockier road. He grew up on a farm in Warwick-shire. Being severely dyslexic, at 14 he was sent to a boarding school in Devon for pupils with special needs, where film screenings instilled in him a desire to act. When he announced this ambition, his father sent him to work on a building site to knock some sense into him.

“By a twist of fate, losing my hearing gave me a ticket to be able to try something new.” He applied to a college in Stratford to do a B-Tech in performing arts. “Obviously, they were a bit concerned because I was having trouble at the interview. I just said, ‘It’s my dream to be an actor in the end.’ The director of the course just very kindly said, ‘Well, we can’t take anybody’s dreams away from them, can we?’”

It didn’t start swimmingly. In his first role, his big moment was a wordless howl: “I was absolutely petrified about doing it because I couldn’t hear and didn’t have much confidence. And I was pretty shy and introverted.” After a year out, he spent another two years doing an HND at De Montfort University, then a year in London working in theatre-in-education with the Box Clever theatre company. His colleagues “were grounded, normal, down-to-earth, and yet I thought they were fantastic actors – and it turned out they’d all been to Bristol Old Vic”. So, at the advanced age of 25, Mawle made a late application for drama school in Bristol. As an audition speech, he chose Hamlet, which he had worked up as a one-man show. He won a scholarship.

Work was still hard to come by.

The break came when he was giving a lift to a friend who was auditioning for Troilus and Cressida at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol. “I cheekily asked if I could read for them as well when I got there.” He came out cast as Troilus. That was in 2003. Since then, it has by no means been plain sailing. Before Soundproof, he spent a year as a special-needs assistant teacher, working with children with Asperger’s and Down’s syndrome, “which I enjoyed”.

If such a thing exists, it sounds like a sort of preparation for playing the son of God. Yet nothing prepared Mawle for the moment he walked on set at high altitude in Morocco for his first scene, dressed in a loincloth, to stand trial before Pontius Pilate.

“I remember stumbling out in my sandals and realising just how bloody hard they were to walk in. The pressure was absolutely immense. It was absolutely petrifying. You’ve got to project the idea of where you are emotionally.” He felt “pretty vulnerable”, but he was fortified by his reading of both the gospels and medical journals. By the time they came to filming the crucifixion, he had established that his character “would be in a really bad way. The inner skeletal muscles would have been torn by the whipping, so he’s in hypervolemic shock by this point. So you make sure you’re extremely out of breath and don’t drink much in the hot sun”.

It was to his advantage that the crucifixion was filmed over three days in baking heat. “What you realise from studying the crucifixion is that you’d have to push yourself up in order to breathe out, and that’s why they break your legs – so you can’t push yourself up any more. You can take a breath in down there, but you can’t actually breathe out and you die by asphyxiation. Obviously, it wasn’t quite that extreme, but nonetheless, there was a sensation of it. Of course, you couldn’t take your arms down, and so all the blood was rushing away. I lost feeling in my arms for three weeks after.”

So, in a way, Mawle didn’t have to act. “You kind of don’t, and you kind of do - there’s the human side, and there’s the side that is beyond my comprehension of what a man can be. I’ve got to understand it myself as best I can. And then take a leap of faith.”

The Passion starts on BBC1 tonight, 8pm

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette