At last, meet the elusive ‘Man in the High Castle’
Amazon series returns with new reveals, old moral complexities
Viewers can finally meet The Man in the High Castle.
In the second season of the Amazon drama, streaming Friday, veteran character actor Stephen Root ( Office Space) plays the previously unseen title role in the series, which imagines an alternate history in which the Axis powers won World War II. (They occupied and divided America into Japanese- and Nazi-controlled regions.)
“This is a person who’s been talked about by the Nazis, by the Japanese and by the Resistance, and none of them know too much about him,” Root says. “The Nazis are afraid of him because they believe he has something that will start more of a revolution in America than is already happening.”
Root’s mysterious man (named Absenden) is a figurehead of the Resistance movement who was often spoken of as protagonist Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) risked her life to smuggle a film to him that depicts the Allies winning the war.
Juliana, who hails from the Japanese-controlled Pacific States and whose sister was killed for her role in the Resistance, “has been seeking answers this entire time,” Davalos says. “She winds up in his presence, and it’s almost a religious experience for her.”
Juliana is now a wanted woman, after allowing covert American Nazi agent Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank) to escape the country with the film last season.
“She basically has to beg for asylum in the Reich,” Davalos says. “She has absolutely nowhere to go.”
That makes it likely she’ll cross paths with Joe’s boss, Obergruppenführer John Smith (Rufus Sewell), the show’s top American Nazi, who’s hiding a secret she could exploit: his eldest son’s neurological disorder, a violation of the party’s eugenics policy.
That provides extra motivation to find the Man: “His only chance of keeping his son alive is maintaining the highest office he can,” Sewell says. “Even in terms of being the best soldier he can for Adolf Hitler, the reason he’s doing it is to protect his son. It’s a terrible moral compromise.”
Meanwhile, Smith’s protégé Joe travels to the Fatherland for his first meeting with his dad, a high-ranking party official who has heard about his successful mission.
“A part of him wanted to prove to his father that he was worthy of doing something for the Reich,” Kleintank says, “but he didn’t realize what it was going to entail. … He’s in shock from everything he’s seen and everything he’s had to do.”
Though Castle, a Philip K. Dick novel that inspired the series, was published in 1963, the actors say the story is as relevant as ever.
“The show is about people’s capacity to normalize and to look the other way from horrors if they’re allowed to,” Sewell says. “It’s a terribly dangerous tendency that can be exploited. It’s always been there to a certain extent, and it’s remarkable that it seems to chime so well at the moment.”