Abe Friedtanzer
Based on the 2017 novel by Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz casts Melanie Lynskey as the author, meeting Holocaust survivor Lali Sokolov (Harvey Keitel) and learning his incredible story. Sixty years earlier, a young Lali (Jonah Hauer-King) is deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where he is given the job of tattooing numbers onto prisoners’ arms. He meets and falls in love with Gita (Anna Próchniak) while suffering cruel treatment from SS officer Stefan Baretzki (Jonas Nay).
Awards Radar had the chance to speak with Lynskey, Nay, director Tali Shalom-Ezer and executive producer Claire Mundell. They emphasized the poignancy of the material and the relevance of this story, which plays out in two parts, both in the past as it happens and in Lali’s memories decades later.
Lynskey expressed her sense of wonder at learning she’d be acting opposite Keitel: “I heard he was cast and I just was like, oh my gosh. I started to think of all the wonderful movies that he’s been in. And then I was like, hang on a sec. There’s so many. If you look over his filmography, there’s so many great movies, and so many instances of him working with directors who were not proven yet, like Quentin Tarantino’s first film, so there’s just a lot of impressive stuff on the filmography. I love Reservoir Dogs. I love The Piano. I’m from New Zealand, you know, I have to say The Piano. That’s a personal favorite.
Nay dug into the emotional impact of playing a sadistic Nazi guard: “It definitely takes one to a dark place. Me, I can only speak for myself, but it took me to a very, very dark place. I think I only did it because I read the novel, and I felt the urge and maybe the responsibility of being a part in the story that Lali Sokolov wanted the world to know… we as creatives working in the film industry with our medium, we have the ability to now, in modern times, to reach a broad audience around the world, and I wanted to be part of that, but the process itself, it took us all to a very, very dark place and we had to really carry each other along the way.”
Mundell commented on the series’ approach to trauma: “We wanted the show not to shy away from depicting a sense of the brutality of the place and the way people were treated, and yet also to remind the audience that when human beings are in a situation where they’re threatened in that way, they have to call upon themselves and their own will to survive. I think that’s a key message of the show: what would any of us do to survive in in these circumstances?”
Watch the full conversations below:
All six episodes of The Tattooist of Auschwitz premiere May 2nd on Peacock.
Comments
Loading…