Caviezel was born in Mount Vernon, Washington, the son of Margaret (née Lavery), a former stage actress and homemaker, and James Caviezel, a chiropractor. He has a younger brother, Timothy, and three sisters, Ann, Amy, and Erin. He was raised in a tightly knit Catholic family in Conway, Washington. His surname is Romansh. His father is of Slovak and Swiss descent, while his mother is Irish. His father attended UCLA and played basketball for coach John Wooden, prompting all the Caviezel siblings to play the sport.\n', '

Caviezel attended Mount Vernon High School for two years before moving to Seattle, Washington, where he lived with family friends in order to play basketball at O\'Dea High School, a Catholic all boys high school. The following spring, he transferred from O\'Dea to another Catholic school, John F. Kennedy Memorial High School in Burien, Washington, where he played basketball and graduated in 1987. He wanted to attend the United States Naval Academy but was denied three times. He then enrolled at Bellevue College, where he played college basketball. A foot injury in his second year put an end to his dream of becoming an NBA player, and he transferred to the University of Washington, where he turned his focus to acting and became a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity.\n', '

Caviezel began acting in plays in Seattle. He earned his Screen Actors Guild card with a minor role in the 1991 film My Own Private Idaho. He then moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. When he decided to move, "people thought I was out of my mind," he said. He was offered a scholarship to study acting at New York\'s Juilliard School in 1993, but he turned it down to portray Warren Earp in the 1994 film Wyatt Earp. He later appeared in an episode of Murder, She Wrote and The Wonder Years. After appearing in G.I. Jane (1997), he had a breakthrough performance in the 1998 Terrence Malick-directed World War II film The Thin Red Line. He played Black John, a Missouri bushwhacker, in Ride with the Devil (1999), an American Civil War film.\n', '

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