02/27/2026
Before the world knew her as Mary Magdalene, Elizabeth Tabish was sitting in a small apartment in Austin, Texas, wondering if she had wasted her life.
She had two degrees from Oklahoma State University. She had a passion for film and theater that burned in her bones. But passion doesn't pay rent, and in those days, the rent was barely getting paid.
"I was really depressed and not knowing what to do," she later told CBN's Faithwire. "I was not working enough to really make ends meet."
She started to believe the dream was dead. That the life she'd imagined, telling stories that mattered, creating art that moved people, was just a fantasy she'd been chasing too long.
And then a script landed in her hands. A role unlike anything she'd ever been offered. Mary Magdalene — not the version most people think they know, not the myths and misunderstandings — but the real woman from the Gospels. The one who was broken, possessed by demons, and then made whole by a man named Jesus.
Elizabeth almost didn't recognize the character. She'd grown up Catholic in Oklahoma, in the heart of the Bible Belt, but her experiences with religion had left her cold. She'd seen too much hypocrisy in churches. Too much distance between what people preached and how they lived. She'd become cynical. She stopped believing.
"I only saw the bad in religion and churches and the hypocrisy and the abuse," she later admitted. "I kind of just threw the baby out with the bathwater."
But something happened when she stepped into Mary Magdalene's story. Something she didn't expect.
The character's pain felt familiar. The desperation, the darkness, the feeling of being lost with no way out — Elizabeth had lived that. Not in the same way, but in the way that suffering connects people across centuries. She didn't have to act the anguish. She knew it.
"I feel like I wasn't able to connect with the Lilith portion of Mary Magdalene had I not gone through some painful things," she said. "Because of that, I'm realizing... God has been there the whole time."
There were moments on set that stopped her in her tracks. Lines she had to say that felt less like a script and more like a mirror. "In the depths, in the heights, You are there." She was speaking those words as Mary Magdalene, but she was hearing them as Elizabeth Tabish, and something inside her shifted.
"It's been really hard to ignore that there's something really special about this experience for me," she admitted. Then, with the kind of quiet conviction that comes from someone discovering something they didn't know they were looking for, she said it plainly: "God's love is real. It's a real thing, and I've been slowly opening up to it."
This wasn't a dramatic, overnight conversion. It was a slow unfolding. A woman who had every reason to stay skeptical, every reason to keep her guard up, choosing instead to stay open. To let the story she was telling begin to tell her something in return.
Elizabeth also found something else in the role that surprised her: a deeper understanding of how Jesus treated women. "Jesus elevated women, period," she said. "His care, respect, and love for women was the same as men — it was for people, all people."
She pointed to how The Chosen portrays mothers, wives, entrepreneurs, women carrying trauma, women carrying joy — the full spectrum of female experience depicted with honesty and dignity. "They're going in a really honest and sometimes raw and challenging direction," she said, "in a way that shows very specifically female traumas and pains."
Today, Elizabeth Tabish is no longer the broke, depressed actress wondering if she should quit. She's become one of the most recognized faces in faith-based entertainment, with roles in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, The Shift, and the new film Between Borders, which tells the true story of an Armenian refugee family finding faith. She's married to Stan Mayer, a former Marine turned playwright. Her career and her faith are both things she once nearly gave up on.
And the lesson she carries with her from Mary Magdalene? It's beautifully simple.
"You're going to make mistakes," she said. "The beautiful thing about that, though, is you're always still loved, no matter what. The further you go into accepting that, the less painful those lessons have to be."
"It's about growth," she continued. "It's about being in a process instead of being perfect. And what a relief that is — to just do your best. You don't have to change the world, but you can change yourself."
She was a skeptic who found faith. A struggling actress who found her calling. A woman who played a broken character and discovered that brokenness was the very thing God could use.
Sometimes the role you're cast in isn't just a job. Sometimes it's a message meant just for you.
~Lovely USA
