Tommy Kail knew all about the book “We Were the Lucky Ones” by Georgia Hunter years before it became a best-selling novel.
“I met Georgia in 1999 before I graduated college,” he told the NY Post in an exclusive interview, “and she married one of my best friends.”
The New York Times bestselling book is inspired by the unbelievable true story of Hunter’s Jewish family who were living in Radom, Poland at the onset of World War II.
Somehow, despite being flung all over the globe and facing unbelievable hardships and danger, they managed to survive.
The sweeping epic is now a Hulu mini-series, starring Joey King, Logan Lerman, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” star Marin Hinkle and several Israeli actors including Ido Samuel, Michael Aloni and Amit Rahav.
Kail directed two of the episodes and is also an executive producer.
He shared that he “supported” Hunter as “she was going through the process of researching it and then deciding to turn it into a book proposal, and when it was finally published even conducted a Barnes & Noble interview on the Upper West Side.
“I obviously read the book and it just stayed with me,” he shared. “It was probably about six months later, I just started imagining it….I called her and said, ‘I feel like the opportunity to put this into a different form is something that we might have fun doing, would you be up for trying to do it together and she said yes.’”
The show comes at a fraught time with the October 7 attack on Israel, the subsequent war in Gaza and a massive increase in global anti-semitism and even Holocaust denial.
The “Hamilton” director is circumspect about discussing it.
“The show is about to come out,” he said. “We’re about to see what it means, when it gets out into the world.”
He noted that the book “sold really well back in 2017.”
“Clearly there’s something about this book that has reached people and reached people for years now,” he went on. “And my hope is that the television show will not replace the book but be a companion for the book.”
“I also feel like my job is to try and make something and put it out into the world and hopefully people will find utility and see something in it that can be useful to them.”
“Shtisel” star Michael Aloni is also hopeful.
“I’m thinking [that] this series can do a lot of good in educating people and telling them (that) this (the Holocaust) is not stories, this is real life that happened and not so long [ago],” he told the Post.
“‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ is about a family that survived, so many families weren’t that lucky…this is a black hole in human history and it’s an important lesson to know so you won’t repeat it again.”
The first three episodes are out now on Hulu.
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