What Made ‘Hunters’ Star Logan Lerman More Nervous Than Acting Opposite Al Pacino?

Amazon’s Hunters traces the adventures of a rogue group of Holocaust survivors, spies, weapons experts, and assassins as they track down and murder Nazis living in 1970s America. However, all this full throttle action isn’t seen through the eyes of Al Pacino‘s Meyer Offerman or any of his crackerjack team. Instead, we see Hunters through the eyes of a reluctant young hero named Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman).

When we meet him, Jonah is a typical Brooklyn teen who has been raised by his loving safta, Ruth (Jeannie Berlin). His life revolves around working at a comic book store, seeing Star Wars for the umpteenth time, and crushing on the girl across the street. All that changes when his safta is murdered one night in their home. In his quest to find Ruth’s killer, Jonah collides with Meyer and his “Hunters,” and debates joining their team.

Bringing this everyman character to life is actor Logan Lerman. No stranger to the business, Lerman has starred in everything from The Perks of Being a Wallflower to the Percy Jackson series. However, Hunters marks his first return to television since appearing in 2004’s Jack & Bobby. Lerman spoke to Decider one-on-one during Winter TCA about the challenges of working in television, the thrill of hunting Nazis with Al Pacino, and the one scene that made him more upset than anything else in his entire career.

DECIDER: It seems like it would be fun to hunt Nazis because they’re the ultimate evil, but there is a moral dilemma for your character as he starts to feel the trauma of what it means to take a man’s life. How did you feel about that balance?

LOGAN LERMAN: The most attractive element was that question at the center of the series which is, does it take evil to fight evil? In order to fight bad guys do you need to be a bad guy yourself and, um, I don’t have an answer for it. And I think this show does, they have, you know, a specific perspective that we go down, but I don’t know where I land on that. What is morality? It’s an interesting question. There’s a lot of questions about existence here.

You get to work a lot with Al Pacino on the show. What has that been like as a young actor and were you nervous at first?

First of all, it’s like the greatest honor of like my life and career. He’s one of my favorite actors.

And I didn’t feel nervous at all, really. I think that largely had to do with Al’s presence. He puts you at ease when you’re with him. He’s very humble. I think his humility just puts people at ease; he’s just a warm, generous, kind, loving person, with the same worries and insecurities that any of us have. And he wants to work hard and try to find the best version of his character and the script. That’s all that I want to do so we just became good friends and worked hard and closely together to create something that, hopefully, audiences will connect with.

So in the few episodes I have seen, there are a ton of violent action scenes. In some of them you’re fighting with often older men, including Al Pacino. What’s sort of the difference as a younger actor doing a fight scene with older actors versus younger actors? Is it more intense? Is it more fun? Are you intimidated by them?

Oh, that’s funny. Oh, it’s fun. Yeah, no, no, I really enjoyed it. The choregraphy’s good and the visual effects are great. They’re fairly simple action sequences. At least for me, it was simple compared to other projects. But there’s, you know, really great visual effects. The blood – it looks so great and all these things.

But it was fun to be in an action show with Al Pacino and Saul [Rubinek] and everybody. This is like a great group of people to go hunt Nazis with.

There’s a lot of sequences that kind feature an almost fantastical element planned with meta theatricality. There’s the Saturday Night Fever scene in Episode 2. How much fun was that to shoot  and was it really shot at Coney Island?

I wish it was more fun. To be truthful, I was miserable. I was. I think it was the only time anybody’s seen me upset at work because I was just like, “I suck and I look so stupid and I don’t know how to do these moves.” I was trying to get them and there’s so many takes where I couldn’t remember. In the middle of the take, I’d be like, “Fuck! Screwed it up,” but I didn’t have much time to learn it.

That was one of the interesting challenges compared to other projects that I’ve worked on cause it’s my first time really doing a TV series. It’s kind of like you prep the pilot so much and then everything else is one and done. You’re trying to figure it out on the go and use the time that you have to make it better, but we didn’t have time to like rehearse it and try to do this thing. So that one day was the one day where I left work and I was like, “I’m, I-I hope this turned out alright because I have no idea if I did well.”

Yeah, we filmed a lot at Coney Island and we filmed that there. It was really cool.

I felt that Jonah is constantly referencing comic books, whether it’s Batman, or even Joseph Campbell, where he’s on his own hero’s journey. How much you guys talk about the comic book genre and how important was it to nail that?

I think it’s just an interesting device to frame our culture’s sense of morality. And you know, who doesn’t love comic books? What kid didn’t grow up with them? You know, what shapes our morality? Comic books are a big part of that.

For this, you know, [as a] young man thrown into this situation, he has to challenge that way of thinking, that ideology. That’s the question at the center of the series: does it take evil to fight evil? In order to fight the bad guys, do you need to be bad yourself? Which comic books clearly answer, “No. You don’t have to kill for revenge or for justice or something like that. You don’t need to be the bad guy.” But this asks the question in reality, not in your comic books. Is [killing] the way to solve the problem of a potential fascist uprising in the U.S.? 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Hunters Season 1 is now streaming on Prime Video.

Where to stream Hunters