Netflix just picked up a new series based on Ira Levin’s 1976 book, “The Boys from Brazil.” The thriller novel is about a Nazi hunter who uncovers a terrible Nazi plot in South America, and has previously been made into a movie in 1978.
The series will be helmed by “The Crown” creator Peter Morgan, who has a pretty close connection to the Holocaust. His father, Arthur Morgenthau, a Jewish businessman, fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and found refuge in England, where he married Morgan’s Catholic Polish mother. Morgenthau died when the TV maker just 9 years old.
“Succession” star Jeremy Strong, who has Jewish ancestry, will play Yakov Liebermann, a Holocaust survivor who tries to bring Nazi criminals on the lam to justice.
“When one of his young protégées working undercover in Brazil learns of a shocking Nazi plan, Liebermann is in a race against time to expose an unimaginable truth,” the Netflix logline reads.
The show will also feature “Shtisel” and “Unorthodox” star Shira Haas, who most recently made her Marvel debut in “Captain America: Brave New World.” The Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated actor will play Anna Koehler, according to Deadline.
Lizzy Caplan, who starred in “Fleishman Is In Trouble” and “Masters of Sex” and was most recently reunited with BFF Jesse Eisenberg in “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” will star as Hannah Liebermann.
Other cast members include August Diehl (“A Hidden Life,” “Inglourious Basterds”), who plays Doctor Johann-Friedrich Meinhardt, a “sadistic Nazi scientist believed to be long-dead,” who “is alive and orchestrating a diabolical project to spark the rise of a Fourth Reich.”
Daniel Brühl (“Inglourious Basterds,” “7 Days in Entebbe”) also stars as Von Harteneck, and “The Crown,” “Sex Education,” and “X-Files” star Gillian Anderson will play Frieda Steiner.
It’s a truly thrilling cast.
“The Boys from Brazil” is the second star-studded scripted show about Nazi hunters in recent memory. It follows Prime Video’s “Hunters” created by David Weil, which starred Al Pacino, Logan Lerman, Josh Radnor, Carol Kane, Saul Rubinek and Jennifer Jason Leigh. The first season of “Hunters” aired back in 2020, and caused quite an uproar, including backlash from the Auschwitz Memorial. Its final season aired in 2023.
Of course, this isn’t the first onscreen adaptation of “The Boys from Brazil.” The 1978 movie based on the novel starred Gregory Peck as Dr. Josef Mengele and Laurence Olivier as Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman; it also featured Lilli Palmer, Steve Guttenberg and Anne Meara. It’s one of many iconic films based off Ira Levin’s groundbreaking horror novels, which include “The Stepford Wives” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” Levin was raised by the children of Russian Jewish immigrants in New York in a mostly secular Jewish household.
A copy of “The Boys from Brazil” was allegedly found at the São Paulo home where Josef Mengele lived in 1979, when he died.
“I’d like to think that he read it and that he was perhaps furious that some Jew writer in New York was using him as the villain of a pop novel,” Levin, who passed away in 2007, reflected in an interview with the American Jewish Committee Oral History Library.
The show’s co-executive producer, Suzanne Mackie, told Netflix that in this new TV adaptation of the novel, Morgan, building on his work from “The Crown,” will continue “to examine the political and emotional forces which, through the 20th century, have molded the world we live in today.” It will be directed by Brazilian TV director Alex Gabassi, who worked on “Black Doves” and “The Crown.”
Filming for the series begins in Europe next month. It will be made up of five one-hour episodes, and will hopefully premiere sometime in late 2026, though no official premiere date has been announced by Netflix as of yet. I truly can’t wait for this dark TV treat.
