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Jim Caviezel was born and raised in Skagitt County, Washington. The Caviezel's were a family of athletes, and Jim steered initially towards athletics, especially basketball. It wasn't until an injured foot sidelined him that he began to develop other interests. His first acting gig was an undergraduate stage adaptation of the Frank Sinatra musical Come Blow Your Horn. In the early 1980s, he re-located to Los Angeles working as a waiter and making the rounds of auditions.

He found small roles on popular TV shows such as Murder, She Wrote and The Wonder Years. He talked his way into his big screen debut as an airline reservations clerk in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991) by pretending to be a recent Italian immigrant with a thick accent. He continued to get small roles in pictures such as Diggstown (1992), Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp (1994), and began to be noticed. As Slov Slovnik in G.I. Jane (1997) he made his presence felt in several scenes of intense fraternization with co-star Demi Moore.

His breakthrough role, however, was another military assignment, the brooding pacifist Private Witt in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998), holding his own in the presence of co-stars like Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, and Adrien Brody. His evident ability to mix soulful introspection with physicality and action came to the fore over the next few years in his work in projects like Ang Lee's Civil War-era Western Ride With the Devil (1999), and in Gregory Hoblit's ingenious time-twist thriller Frequency (2000), in which he played a troubled son hooking up across two decades of time with his long-dead father (Dennis Quaid). In 2001 he starred with Jennifer Lopez in Angel Eyes, directed by Luis Mandoki. He had all the soaring range needed to convincingly play the wrongly convicted Edmond Dantes in Kevin Reynolds's adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' classic The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), and a war hero wrestling with a murder charge in Carl Franklin's courtroom drama High Crimes (2002), with Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd.

It could be said that Jim's role in The Passion of The Christ made the ultimate demands on a performer both physically and emotionally. The actor was chosen for the role because he was willing to commit to this unique project whole-heartedly.

In 2004, Caviezel appeared with Robin Williams and Mira Sorvino in Omar Naim's Final Cut and with Claire Forlani and Jeremy Northam in Rowdy Harrington's Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius. He will next be seen starring in the film Unknown with Barry Pepper and Greg Kinnear. He is currently shooting his next film, Outlander in Nova Scotia.