Al Pacino to play Nazi hunter in new Amazon series
Set to be released in 2020, Hunters takes place in 1977 in New York City.
By HANNAH BROWNHunters - Tease: X Marks The Spot I Prime Video
Maybe it’s the influence of Al Pacino’s Israeli girlfriend, Meital Dohan, but his newest role is as a Nazi hunter in the upcoming Amazon Prime series Hunters.In the teaser trailer Amazon just released, Pacino’s Meyer Offerman faces the camera and says, in heavily accented English, “This is not murder. This is mitzvah,” followed by a lot of action that looks like murder and Pacino drawing red Xs over certain photos, presumably those of Nazis who have been neutralized.Created by David Weil and executive produced by Get Out and Us director Jordan Peele, Hunters takes place in 1977 in New York City. The Hunters are a group there who have discovered that hundreds of Nazi officials have fled to America and plan to establish a Fourth Reich. Meyer is leading a team of crack fighters to keep the SS out of the US. It sounds a bit like The Boys from Brazil, a 1978 movie where a Nazi hunter played by Laurence Olivier hunts down a group of SS officers hiding out in Paraguay who are engaged in a plot to clone some top Nazis that is being masterminded by Joseph Mengele, who is played by Gregory Peck. This is not Pacino’s first time playing a Jew by any means. He has played such real-life Jews as Roy Cohn in Angels in America and Phil Spector in a TV movie about the troubled music producer who was convicted of murder. He’s also played the lead in adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Humbling, to name just a few of his Semitic screen credits. He got some of the best reviews of his career playing perhaps the greatest Jewish anti-hero of all time, Shylock iin a 2004 screen version of The Merchant of Venice.Hunters is set to be released in 2020. Pacino’s costars include Logan Lerman, best known for The Perks of Being a Wallflower but who also starred in a recent Philip Roth adaptation, Indignation; Louis Ozawa Changchien (Kidding); Ebony Obsidian (If Beale Street Could Talk); Henry Hunter Hall (When They See Us); Carol Kane (Taxi); Lena Olin (The Unbearable Lightness of Being); and Saul Rubinek (The Last Tycoon, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel).Pacino recently walked the red carpet with Dohan in their first high-profile public appearance as a couple at the premiere of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, a fact-based Netflix mob drama in which Pacino portrays Jimmy Hoffa, a real-life labor leader who clashed with – and was likely murdered by – the Mafia. Robert De Niro, Pacino’s costar in Godfather 2, plays a mob hitman in the film.The Irishman will start streaming on Netflix at the end of November.