THE LOST SYMBOL: Ashley Zukerman on Bringing a Young Robert Langdon to Life

After being featured in five Dan Brown books and three films (portrayed by Tom Hanks) the character of Robert Langdon gets a new life, via MANHATTAN star Ashley Zukerman, on the Peacock series THE LOST SYMBOL.

“It’s an asset to us, that…a lot of people already have a connection to the character either from the books or the movies,” Zukerman says in the video below about this take on Langdon. “I think that’s something that we lean on, and that we need.”

Though THE LOST SYMBOL is the third book in Brown’s Langdon series, the television take serves as an origin story. “[We] explain why this guy will become the person we’ll see later on,” he explains. “So I think…the behaviors, his rigidity or his arrogance or his hubris or his loneliness, things that we see of him in the books, I think those are things that we get to delve into and explore with him in the show.”

For Zukerman, whose TV credits also include SUCCESSION and A TEACHER, he had seen the movies when they came out, but hadn’t read the books—a move that ended up being beneficial.

“After I was cast, I had these 3000 pages of material to study for a character I was going to play,” he says. “And not only play, but play the younger version of. It’s exactly as I said: I got to look for clues, and then see what might be helpful, and what might not be helpful.”

“What I thought a lot about was there there is a distance he has with people,” he continues. “There’s a want to connect, but something that stops him. There’s an immense amount of knowledge, and yet like an inability to feel. And I find that very fascinating, especially with this thing that gets alluded to, this claustrophobia that gets used often as a story point.”

To that end, Zukerman combined the two ideas: “What makes him claustrophobic, socially, and as a person, as well? Like claustrophobic in life. And I thought that was really interesting.”

“There’s also this world conversation about fact and fiction right now,” he continues. “And to play a character who is so knowledgeable that he has a very hard time believing anything just because he feels it. That was something that drew me and that’s something that’s fascinating that we get to explore in it.”

Watch more from Zukerman…

THE LOST SYMBOL, Peacock

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