Joey King fell in love with her character from We Were The Lucky Ones quickly. Actually, it was before she even read the script.
“When you’re dealing with true subject matter, it’s going to hit you a little bit harder,” she says. “You’re going to connect with that person even more, because it’s undeniable. It happened.”
King plays Halina Kurc in Hulu‘s Holocaust survival drama, which is adapted from the Georgia Hunter novel of the same name, which in turn was inspired by Hunter’s real family. King read the book after showrunner Erica Lipez and director Thomas Kail suggested it to her. Halina grabbed her instantaneously: “Never having seen the script, I was in,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter.
King’s Halina is one of five children in the Kurc family who, along with their parents, each endured their own battle for survival during Europe’s Holocaust. The miniseries weaves each of their stories together, spanning eight episodes which begin in 1939 and follow the characters through the end of the war. The finale releases next week, on May 2.
“You have to remember that they don’t know what’s about to happen next,” King says. History can, by nature of its past tense, seem inevitable to us, but “Halina doesn’t know if she’s going to live or die. She doesn’t know if her family is going to live or die. All these things are big questions in her head, and she’s just focused on moving forward in the moment. She’s very good at compartmentalizing to be able to make it through today.”
As she hones in on her survival, Halina also falls in love with an architect named Adam, played by Sam Woolf. King says her character’s romance in the face of war is part of what she found “really inspiring.”
“She has these moments where her hope is really tested — she loses hope, and then she gets it back. And she has a sense of humor, and she’s spunky. And it’s because she’s really living in the day-to-day,” she says.
The fullness of Hunter and Lipez’s storytelling extends to the entire Kurc family. “They have personalities within the war,” says King. “It’s not just these horrible things are happening. We love them as people, we’re so compelled by them and who they are.”
Toward the end of filming, Halina’s real-life daughter, Anna, joined some of her other relatives on set, where she met King for the first time.
“Anna came up to me, and she saw me and went ‘Mama!’ And I just started crying,” King said. “That was so big of Anna to do that, to not know me, not know how I’ve portrayed her mother yet, having not really seen anything, and just kind of pull me in a hug and be like, ‘You’ve got this. I trust you to show my mother’s journey.’ I carried that in my heart.”
This personal side of We Were The Lucky Ones runs deep, as the entire main cast are themselves Jewish. “I’m really proud to be who I am,” King said. “But it does come with… not everyone likes Jewish people. It’s really important to be proud of who I am and share that, and to be able to tell a story that feels very personal is really special.”
The result, King says, is a sort of timeless timeliness. “The hardest thing is to summarize the complexities of what’s going on in the world right now in one statement,” she said. “Yes, antisemitism is on the rise. But so is racism, so is Islamophobia. Our show is not meant to be a political statement of any kind, nor is our press. But what I hope can happen is that people can watch the show and whatever their feelings may be, just attach some more compassion.”
We Were The Lucky Ones releases its final episode May 2 on Hulu.
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