‘LOST’ AND FOUND
‘Symbol’ sets new Langdon on another scavenger hunt
Robert Langdon has a smartphone now, but other than that, he’s still the know-it-all Dan Brown intended.
Peacock’s “The Lost Symbol,” premiering Thursday, is based on Brown’s third novel after “Angels and Demons” and “The Da Vinci Code,” popularized by the Tom Hanks movies — but with a younger, hotter version of the genius symbologist, played by “Succession” star Ashley Zukerman.
The series is described as “the early adventures” of Langdon, but only inasmuch as he is younger to fit the 37-year-old Zukerman; the show is set in the present day, right down to a character pulling out an online translator for Hebrew script.
“I was able to read the books through the lens of the character I was about to play, able to pull clues about who he was,” Zukerman told the Daily News. “Because our story is using the third book as the beginning of an origin story, all of these clues I could pick up in the reading told me about the person I was going to become in 20 years.”
“I could look for those kinds of clues and unravel them a bit. Playing someone 20 years earlier, I could ruffle his features a little more, push things or pull them a little more.”
Just like in “The Da Vinci Code,” Zukerman’s Langdon, always believes he’s the smartest one in the room, even in the halls of Harvard or the U.S. Capitol, where he is drawn by a call from his old mentor Peter Solomon, played by Eddie Izzard.
By the time Langdon arrives, Peter is nowhere to be found — only his severed hand, his daughter Katherine (Valorie Curry), a scientist in her own right, and an unraveling mystery with the Freemasons.
“Every character has a different investment in the story, a personal investment, a different demon that they’re trying to work through. But they all are coming at the story from those different angles,” Curry, 35, told The News.
“The fact that all of these characters are so deeply grounded and so deeply invested in the story helps keep it moving and keep all of those elements in play all the time.”
Both Zukerman and Curry acknowledged the strangeness of telling a story about conspiracies in a time when real life is rampant with dangerous theories. Zukerman, like “The Lost Symbol,” stressed the importance of not only gathering information for yourself, but gathering the right information.
“We do know that there are flaws in our society. I think everyone can feel that,” he told The News.
“Everyone feels like there’s something wrong at the top; they just have different ways of articulating what that is and different groups are co-opting that idea.”
Curry pointed to the balance that Katherine takes between science and belief.
“There are a lot of conspiracies and conspiracy theories that don’t deserve to see the light of day. What is frustrating is that there are things that are going do deserve to see the light of day and don’t. The conspiracy isn’t QAnon, it’s gerrymandering and court packing. Can we talk about lobbies instead? Maybe it’s because those don’t smack of the same sensationalism, don’t feel as narrative, that they don’t get traction in the same circles,” she told The News.
“It’s something we’re aware of and it’s part of why we really want to track really closely to the importance of fact. So much of what this show is about is the danger of extremism, the danger of the belief in these theories to the point that it undermines your humanity or your ability to look at other people and their humanity. Dogmatic belief is not validated in this storytelling. If anything, the heroes are people who think critically.”