{"id":246186,"date":"2020-02-26T01:13:37","date_gmt":"2020-02-26T06:13:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=246186"},"modified":"2020-02-26T01:13:37","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T06:13:37","slug":"canadian-actor-saul-rubinek-feels-he-was-born-to-play-nazi-hunter-on-hunters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2020\/02\/26\/canadian-actor-saul-rubinek-feels-he-was-born-to-play-nazi-hunter-on-hunters\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian actor Saul Rubinek feels he was ‘born to play’ Nazi hunter on ‘Hunters’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Rubinek plays a weapons expert and Polish-born Holocaust survivor alongside Carol Kane as his wife. (File photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America – Saul RubinekUploaded by maybeMaybeMaybe, CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

TORONTO \u2014 Canadian actor Saul Rubinek’s role of a Polish Jew who hunts down Nazis in the new series \u201cHunters\u201d hits close to home.<\/p>\n

Oscar-winning \u201cGet Out\u201d writer-director Jordan Peele executive produced the Amazon Prime Video drama, about a group of vigilantes pursuing escaped Nazi officials who are conspiring to create a Fourth Reich in the U.S. in the late 1970s.<\/p>\n

Rubinek plays a weapons expert and Polish-born Holocaust survivor alongside Carol Kane as his wife.<\/p>\n

Rubinek’s real-life daughter, Hannah Reid Rubinek, co-stars as the daughter of the couple who are recruited to be a part of the Nazi-hunting group by Al Pacino’s Holocaust survivor character in New York.<\/p>\n

Rubinek says he relates to the material because his own parents survived the German occupation of Poland during the Second World War and were hidden by a couple in order to survive for two and a half years.<\/p>\n

Rubinek was born in a refugee camp in Germany and immigrated with his parents to Canada, first to Montreal and then Ottawa, in 1949.<\/p>\n

\u201cI auditioned for the series but it was kind of like I was born to play it,\u201d Rubinek said in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles, where he now lives. \u201cMy first language is Yiddish and the character is a Polish Jew whose first language is Yiddish and comes to America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rubinek also felt another profound connection to the show’s look at the complexities of confronting evil.<\/p>\n

Rubinek said when his daughter was 13, he presented a documentary he’d made about his parents’ experience, titled \u201cSo Many Miracles,\u201d to her classroom to help the students understand the Holocaust and inspire them to investigate their own family history.<\/p>\n

But the situation became \u201cparticularly difficult\u201d when they found out that one of Hannah’s classmates was the great-granddaughter of someone in the Nazi Party’s SS organization.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was to the courage of that classmate’s mother, who was willing to open up and find out about her own grandfather and to share it,\u201d Rubinek said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo when showing the documentary, there was my daughter, a granddaughter of victims, and the great-granddaughter of a perpetrator, who were essentially holding hands watching this film. And that then comes to roost here in this series.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause this is a series about the consequences of that kind of horror, both from the point of view of people who want to create a new world order and their own misguided and fanatical idealism, and also from the people who want revenge for what happened in the past \u2014 and find that there are profound ramifications for using violence as a way to justify their revenge. So, you look into the abyss, with the risk that the abyss looks back at you.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Weil, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust, created the series.<\/p>\n

The show combines scenes of horrific violence, both contemporary in nature and through flashbacks to the Holocaust, along with dark humour and comic book-style touches.<\/p>\n

The museum of the Nazi German Auschwitz death camp has expressed dismay over a scene that shows a murderous game of human chess being played there, insisting that no such thing took place at the camp.<\/p>\n

In last week’s interview, Rubinek said he hadn’t yet watched the series but he’d read it all and felt it was \u201cvery provocative\u201d and \u201cbound to offend all kinds of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he was in support of its \u201cmultifaceted storytelling techniques that use all the tools in their toolbox to tell the story in an entertaining and a profound way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of people who are Holocaust deniers out there, and also we’re living in a world where anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-otherness has become the norm,\u201d Rubinek said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe’re in a world of increasingly right-wing nationalistic governments that tend to divide people and create a hostile environment for people that don’t think or look like you.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, a show like this that deals with trying to stop a Fourth Reich \u2014 which has its own racial purity designs on their idea of a better world \u2014 going all over the world as a television series is bound to do some good, especially since it’s not simplistic and the bad guys are not just monsters. If they were just monsters, they would be easy to explain. They’re not, they’re human beings. And the people that are after them are human beings and they have to pay consequences for how they go after them.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TORONTO \u2014 Canadian actor Saul Rubinek’s role of a Polish Jew who hunts down Nazis in the new series \u201cHunters\u201d …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":246187,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","category-hollywood","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246188,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246186\/revisions\/246188"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}