ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

Based on Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, this four-part limited series is about the life of a blind French girl, Marie-Laure (Aria Mia Loberti) and her father, Daniel LeBlanc (Mark Ruffalo), a curator at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. The duo flee German-occupied Paris for the small town of Saint-Malo with a legendary diamond to keep it from falling into the hands of the Nazis.

To prepare for the role,

Ruffalo, 55, studied

France in the World-WarII

era. “I knew a lot about

World War II already, so for me, getting acquainted with gemology was a big thing,” he says. “We found a museum outside of

Budapest where the curator let me handle some semi-precious stones and dinosaur bones. I was able to pick his brain and speak with other curators, people who really loved the sciences and were thrilled to share that love with someone else. It really helped me tap into Daniel’s sense of wonder for the place.”

In order to give his daughter Marie-Laure as much independence as possible while also protecting her,

Daniel constructs a three-dimensional map of her environs in both Paris and Saint-Malo. The majority of those wooden models were made by model-makers in Hungary, but Ruffalo picked up a saw and a whittling blade to get the feel of making a few pieces with his own hands. “I’ve done a lot of woodworking,” he says. “I’m usually tinkering around the house, or building some shelves, so I knew how to work with those materials and tools.”

In Saint-Malo, Daniel and Marie-Laure stay with

Marie-Laure’s Uncle Etienne (Hugh Laurie), who transmits clandestine radio broadcasts as part of the Resistance, and where Marie-Laure encounters

Werner (Louis Hofmann), a teenager enlisted by Hitler’s

regime to track down illegal broadcasts. Will

Werner turn them in or will his special connection to

Marie-Laure save them?