“The Crown” creator Peter Morgan is finally drawing on his Jewish roots for an exciting new Netflix series. Morgan, the son of a German Jew who fled the Nazis and wound up in London, will be helming a series adaptation of the 1976 science fiction novel by Ira Levin called “The Boys from Brazil.” The 1978 film adaptation of the book starring Lauren Olivier, Gregory Peck, Anne Meara and Steve Guttenberg was nominated for three Academy Awards.
While we don’t know much about the project yet, we do know its Jewish protagonist, Yakov Liebermann — loosely based on real-life Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor Simon Weisenthal — will be played by “Succession” star Jeremey Strong, who, like Morgan, has a Jewish father. While Strong does not identify as Jewish, he has spoken about his closeness to his Jewish grandfather, a plumber from Queens with whom he spent much time and celebrated a few Passover seders.
Strong has played many a historic Jewish role, from Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza in the play “New Jerusalem” to lawyer Roy Cohn in “The Apprentice,” a role that recently earned him his first Academy Award nomination. He does seem perfectly poised to star in a trippy and dark project like this. “The Boys from Brazil” tells the tale of a Nazi hunter who gets a call tipping him off to the fact that the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known as “the angel of death,” who experimented on Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz, is alive and well in Brazil. Not only that, but he is trying to enact a sinister plot to bring the Nazis back into power. Liebermann, of course, tries to stop him.
If you feel like you’re getting a bit of TV déjà vu, you’re not alone. Prime Video’s “Hunters,” starring Logan Lerman, Josh Radnor and Carol Kane, told a similar tale of a group of Nazi hunters in 1970s New York trying to foil a sinister plan. While the show was panned by the likes of the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, I found it to be highly compelling Jewish TV.
For anyone who watched all six seasons of Morgan’s excellent and critically acclaimed “The Crown,” following generations of the British monarchy starting with the rise to power of Queen Elizabeth II, you can assume “The Boys from Brazil” won’t be as funny and camp as “Hunters,” but it will probably be excellently crafted and compelling, and will allow Morgan to do something a little less prim and proper than a show about British nobility.
“I’d like to do something where people aren’t polite, aren’t upper-class British, and they have guns. I want some guns,” Morgan said in an interview with Variety back in 2024 in which he revealed that he was working on “The Boys from Brazil.” He recalled enviously listening to fellow showrunners talk about how to deal with scenes where one disposes of a body. Without spoiling much, Morgan has assured us that his new show will indeed feature a lot of (Nazi, we assume) bodies. We can’t wait to see his action-filled TV dreams come to fruition, which will hopefully be ready to binge on Netflix soon.
