We Were The Lucky Ones is a harrowing tale based on a true story about a Jewish family who is trying to find their way back to one another after being separated during the Holocaust.
Because the series follows one family, it has a more “intimate lens” into the Holocaust, giving showrunner Erica Lipez an opportunity to depict a story of that period in history “that people haven’t seen before” — including fewer depictions of violence.
“I have pretty strong feelings about gratuitous violence and I think it’s actually sometimes evoking violence without seeing it can be just as scary,” she said during the show’s Deadline Contenders TV Panel on Saturday. “Particularly in the early episodes, when the violence isn’t happening to the family, but it is starting to escalate around them and that danger is coming — your relationship to violence is people don’t usually just stop and watch it and the camera lingers on it. It’s happening around you. It’s happening as you pass by. I actually think that is so much more unnerving and truthful than just lingering on it unnecessarily.”
Lipez was joined by series stars Logan Lerman and Joey King, the latter of whom agreed that it “was always very clear with the intention from the very beginning that we wanted to imply more than show, because it is more unnerving sometimes.”
“I think our show does a fabulous job of portraying that disturbing nature of what’s going on without just fixating on only that,” King continued.
Solely Jewish actors were cast to depict the Kurc family in We Were The Lucky Ones — another decision that Lipez said felt natural for the story they were trying to tell.
“We wanted to find the most incredible talent on screen but also the most incredible humans off screen, because this is really daunting material, and we knew we really just needed the best people to show up for it,” Lipez explained. “We also really felt like we wanted a group of people who felt a deep need within themselves to tell this family story.”