Parting Shot

Ashley Zukerman

Taking on a role made famous by another actor is already intimidating, but one Tom Hanks made famous? That’s a whole other deal. But Ashley Zukerman, who plays Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon in the new Peacock series The Lost Symbol (September 16), took it in stride. “I loved the films, and Tom Hanks is one of the greatest actors of our time. This should have been more daunting than it was, it just felt like I could launch into this from myself.” In this version, which author Dan Brown executive produced, we see young Langdon, years before we originally met him in The Da Vinci Code. “We get to explore what made him the person everyone knows. So we lean on the love everyone already has for the material, but we tried to take it back a few steps.” Zukerman actually hadn’t read the books before being cast. “It wasn’t by design that I hadn’t read them. I had just missed them.” But from the very beginning, Brown made it clear that Zukerman had to make Langdon his own. “It felt like we were given both a mandate and freedom to make something a little new.”

“We were given both a mandate and freedom to make something a little new.”