Jeremy Strong is heading into the final stretch of the Oscars season with the Best Supporting Actor nominee poised to potentially nab a statue for his compelling performance as Roy Cohn in the Donald Trump biopic, “The Apprentice.” While Strong has ended his award-winning HBO series “Succession,” he’s looking to make a significant return to the small screen with a series adaptation of the 1976 Ira Levin novel “The Boys From Brazil.”
Netflix, according to Deadline, has cast Strong in the fictionalized telling of the Nazi Party, now defeated across Europe, trying to rebuild in the South American country of Brazil. The story explores Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele attempting to launch The Fourth Reich, and then Nazi hunters are made aware of their nefarious plan.
READ MORE: ‘The Weight’: Ethan Hawke & Russell Crowe To Star In 1930s Oregon Survival Drama
Strong is set to play Ezra Lieberman in the show, which hails from Peter Morgan (“The Crown”). The character is a Nazi hunter that is tipped off about their resurrection and attempts to regroup, which would threaten the entire world if left to their own devices.
The original logline for the 1976 novel as posted by Amazon:
“Alive and hiding in South America, the fiendish Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a horrifying project―the creation of the Fourth Reich. Barry Kohler, a young investigative journalist, gets wind of the project and informs famed Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman, but before he can relay the evidence, Kohler is killed. Thus, Ira Levin opens one of his career’s strangest and most masterful novels. Why has Mengele marked a number of harmless aging men for murder? What is the hidden link that binds them? What interest can they possibly hold for their killers: six former SS men dispatched from South America by the most wanted Nazi still alive, the notorious “Angel of Death “? One man alone must answer these questions and stop the killings―Lieberman, himself aging and thought by some to be losing his grip on reality.”
While the feature film adaptation from 1978 starring the late Gregory Peck (who played the fictionalized version of Dr. Josef Mengele) took place in the 1970s, the lingering influence of modern Nazis and fascists operating today is sadly topical as hell, with democratically elected politicians, musicians, tech-bros, and a sitting President championing the dark side of humanity that stood for the percussion, genocide, and amplifying the normalization of race/religion-based bigotry.
Support independent movie journalism to keep it alive. Sign up for The Playlist Newsletter. All the content you want and, oh, right, it’s free.
We can’t wait to see who they end up casting alongside Strong because this series will have plenty of seasoned and new actors jumping on “The Boys From Brazil” to work with Morgan and Strong.