This should have been more daunting than it was, it just felt like I could launch into this from myself. I loved the films and Tom Hanks is one of the greatest actors of our time. ĭid you watch the films and were they an influence at all? I'll wait to see what the hair reaction is and what that subreddit is about. But I doubt Tom Hanks was concerned about his hair, either. Tom Hanks' hair from the films basically became a character. So I'm sort of retrospectively glad that I hadn't read them before so that I could only read them through that lens. That's a pretty fascinating experience to read five books imagining being able to throw myself into the experience quite literally, like looking for clues into the character I'm about to play. I hadn't read the books until I got the audition. I think what the show does is it tries to marry the two into the experience of the characters, and especially of Langdon himself.
People of faith read the books one way and people of fact-if that's the opposite of faith-read them another way. That's true when reading the books, it's a reflection of whatever you yourself were experiencing or thinking about in that moment. It speaks to religious and secular people. We get to spend 10 hours on it.ĭan Brown's work is not really polarizing.
The fact is that he becomes a zealot the other way, where he just won't allow himself to believe anything just because he feels it, that's a pathology in itself. Even half a season in, I'm learning that with Langdon, he has told himself he cannot believe something to be true just because he feels it. I think something that's consistent in the books, and what Dan Brown told me, is that Langdon would love to have faith but there's something in him that can't allow it. In the pilot, you start to get a sense of it. I think we have more time to delve into the characters and what they're experiencing. Dan Brown is involved, so it felt like we were given both a mandate and freedom to make something a little new. The other thing is I think the writers have made something very, very new.
So we lean on the love everyone already has for the material, but we tried to take it back a few steps. We get to explore what made him the person everyone knows. One is that the show uses the third book as a jumping-off point. Was it intimidating taking on a role that's so well known?īy every metric, it should have been. "It felt like we were given both a mandate and freedom to make something a little new." I had just missed them." But from the very beginning, Brown made it clear that Zukerman had to make Langdon his own. "It wasn't by design that I hadn't read them. So we lean on the love everyone already has for the material, but we tried to take it back a few steps." Zukerman actually hadn't read the books before being cast. "We get to explore what made him the person everyone knows. This should have been more daunting than it was, it just felt like I could launch into this from myself." In this version, which author Dan Brown executive produced, we see young Langdon, years before we originally met him in The Da Vinci Code. "I loved the films, and Tom Hanks is one of the greatest actors of our time.
#Tom hanks the lost symbol series#
But Ashley Zukerman, who plays Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon in the new Peacock series The Lost Symbol (September 16), took it in stride. Taking on a role made famous by another actor is already intimidating, but one Tom Hanks made famous? That's a whole other deal.