Jeremy Strong is headed back to TV, and he’ll be hunting Nazi clone babies while doing so: Deadline reports that Strong—currently nominated for an Oscar for his part in last year’s The Apprentice—has signed on to star in Netflix’s new TV adaptation of The Boys From Brazil, and he’s teaming up with The Crown‘s Peter Morgan to do so.
For both men, it’ll be their first time back on regular television since concluding a high-profile project: Strong wrapped Succession back in May 2023, while Morgan finished The Crown in December of that same year. The pair will be joining together for a TV adaptation of Ira Levin’s 1976 novel, previously adapted for film by Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck.
Strong is expected to star in the Olivier part, as the show’s version of Levin’s Nazi hunter, Yakov Liebermann. (Generally accepted as being based on real-world figures like Simon Wiesenthal, and re-named Ezra Lieberman for the movie.) Liebermann gets pulled into a dangerous conspiracy after he receives clues that the infamous Josef Mengele may be alive and well in South America, where he’s been busy running the world’s most disturbing experiment on “nature vs. nurture” with a bunch of loose Hitler DNA and some unsuspecting moms.
The question facing the show, of course, is how you adapt source material where your primary twist is so incredibly well known: Both the film and the novel treat the nature of the titular sons from São Paulo as a big mystery, but that was 50 years, and a ton of cultural references, ago. It remains to be seen how Morgan and Strong can build the necessary tension of that reveal out to series length.
