Caviezel began acting in plays in Seattle, Washington. 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 episodes 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.

In 1996, Caviezel married Kerri Browitt, a high school English teacher. They have adopted three children from China who had cancer. They are both devout Catholics who oppose abortion. Caviezel has been a featured public speaker at religious venues since the release of The Passion of the Christ. On March 19, 2005, he was the spokesman for the first Catholic Men’s Conference in Boston. Caviezel’s sister-in-law, Kristen, is the wife of former St. Louis Rams head coach Scott Linehan.

Caviezel was originally cast to play Scott Summers / Cyclops in X-Men (2000), but dropped out because of a scheduling conflict with the film Frequency (2000). He starred in the mainstream films Pay It Forward (2000), The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), and Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004). In 2000, he played the lead role in Madison, a film about hydroplane racing in Madison, Indiana. The film was completed in 2001, but did not appear in theaters until a limited release in 2005. In 2002, he played a pivotal role in the film I Am David.

He had leading roles in the 2006 films Unknown and Déjà Vu. He played Kainan in Outlander (2008) and provided the voice of Jesus on the 2007 New Testament audio dramatization The Word of Promise. In 2008, he starred in Long Weekend.

On October 24, 2006, Caviezel was featured with Patricia Heaton, Kurt Warner, and Mike Sweeney in an advertisement opposing Missouri Constitutional Amendment 2, which allowed any form of embryonic stem cell research and therapy in Missouri that is otherwise legal under federal law. He began the advertisement by saying, “Le-bar nash be-neshak” (Aramaic for “You betray the Son of Man with a kiss”), a reference to Judas’ betrayal of Jesus Christ and a phrase used the Gospel According to St. Luke. (In the advertisement, the line did not include a translation into English.) Caviezel closed the commercial with the line, “You know now. Don’t do it. Vote no on 2.” The advertisement was a response to a commercial featuring Michael J. Fox, who favored embryonic stem cell research.

In 2009, Caviezel played French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam in The Stoning of Soraya M., a drama set in 1986 Iran about the execution of a young mother. When asked about how his Catholic faith was affected by this story, he said, “you don’t have to go any further than the gospels to figure out what the right thing to do is, whether you should be more concerned helping someone regardless of their religion or where they’re from”. That same year, he reprised the role of Jesus in the latest installment of The Word of Promise. Caviezel starred in The Prisoner, a remake of the British science fiction series The Prisoner, in November 2009.

Caviezel portrayed Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. During filming, he was struck by lightning, accidentally scourged, had his shoulder dislocated, and suffered from pneumonia and hypothermia. Prior to filming, Gibson reportedly warned Caviezel that playing Jesus would hurt his acting career. In 2011, he admitted that good roles had been hard to come by since, but stated that this movie, in particular the role of Jesus Christ, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

From 2011 to 2016, Caviezel starred in the CBS drama series Person of Interest as John Reese, a former CIA agent who now works for a mysterious billionaire as a vigilante. The show received the highest ratings in 15 years for a series pilot and consistently garnered over 10 million weekly viewers. Caviezel was nominated for the People’s Choice Award for Favorite Dramatic TV Actor in 2014 and again in 2016 for his work on Person of Interest.

Caviezel starred in the 2014 football film When the Game Stands Tall as De La Salle High School coach Bob Ladouceur, whose Concord, California Spartans prep team had a 151-game winning streak from 1992 to 2003, an American sporting record. He appeared in the 2013 film Escape Plan, playing a warden who maintains order in the world’s most secret and secure prison.

Caviezel narrated two documentaries in 2016 regarding Christianity. One of them was the acclaimed Liberating a Continent: John Paul II and the Fall of Communism and the other was The Face of Mercy. In an interview about the former film, he stated that John Paul II had crushed communism “with love”.

In 2017, Caviezel signed on as lead character of CBS’s SEAL Team series. However, Caviezel left the project due to creative differences before production began and was replaced by David Boreanaz.

Caviezel portrayed the Apostle Luke in the film Paul, Apostle of Christ, which opened in theaters on March 23, 2018, to mixed reviews.

In January 2018, Caviezel’s agent announced that Caviezel had signed on with Mel Gibson to reprise his role as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ sequel, entitled The Resurrection of the Christ.