Ido Samuel

Courtesy of Ryan West

In less than a decade, actor Ido Samuel has appeared in three Holocaust-related projects: Valerie McCaffrey’s short film Dirty Bomb, Hulu’s We Were the Lucky Ones miniseries, and the role-playing video game The Light in the Darkness.

You’d think so much time spent exploring the darkness of life under the brutal Nazi regime—even in a fictional context—might result in emotional burnout for any performer. Samuel, however, doesn’t see it that way.

For him, these tough and draining roles are more crucial than ever in the age of social media, when vitriol and misinformation can spread like wildfire.

“There are a lot of these important stories we need to tell,” he recently told me over Zoom. “I feel like my mission as an actor is not to preach to anybody, not to lecture anybody. I just want to show them the humanity. People nowadays create this evil image of Jews. People open their Facebook, see that in front of their face, and they’re like, 'Oh, they’re so evil.’ It’s very important to show the real side of it.”

While he grew up celebrating the annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) in his native Israel, the idea of anti-Jewish sentient felt almost alien to him against the backdrop of a predominantly Jewish country.

“As kids, we’re used to hearing stories about antisemitism,” he said, “but somehow it felt very far away.”

All of that changed following the Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7, 2023 and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza. Having just finished filming We Were the Lucky Ones (where he played religiously disillusioned Judenrat officer Isaac), Samuel still operated under the somewhat naive assumption that he was far-removed from the rhetoric and atrocities of World War II.

“I was telling a story of something that happened, because I’d never personally experienced antisemitism before,” he added. "I felt like, ‘Okay, there are people who are antisemitic, but it’s [a small group].’ And suddenly, it became so trendy. Suddenly it became cool to be antisemitic; to hate certain people, to generalize an entire people … and justify it."

At the moment, he’s working with Dirty Bomb writer/director Valerie McCaffrey to develop the short into a full-length feature entitled The Space Between Men. Set at the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp, which relied on slave labor to build the German V-2 rockets , the film is set to explore the relationship between inmate Aharon (Samuel) and Hitler’s chief rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, as the former attempts to sabotage the long-range weapons from being completed.

“It’s not a Hollywood good ending. Sometimes the bad person [wins]," teased Samuel, referring to the fact that von Braun was recruited by the American government after the war as part of Operation Paperclip and faced no repercussions for alleged war crimes. “He goes to America and creates NASA while the Jews who ‘helped him’ just got killed.”

Perhaps his most interesting role to date is that of a character named Jakob in the Light in the Darkness video game where the player experiences life in Nazi-occupied France through the eyes of a Jewish family (the director’s cut is expected to drop this summer).

“It’s the first game about the Holocaust,” Samuel said, quickly noting that while the premise initially “sounds weird” at first, the role-playing title is actually a smart way for creator Luc Bernard to educate a new generation, “especially when all their knowledge is from TikTok and social media,” Samuel mused.

He continued: “Kids don’t want to sit and watch sad stories and films and listen to people older than them talk. They don’t have the patience for it. They’re looking for some sort of excitement. So, I think the video game is a great idea to teach them. And it’s not lecturing. They get to connect to the characters, they get to experience what they’ve been through. You get to choose what they had to choose back then, which is very powerful. Because as a viewer of film or TV, you just watch and the director and the filmmakers tell you what’s going on. Here, you can control what path to go through."

For his part, Samuel sees the game as the culmination of his previous Holocaust projects, for which he conducted thorough research, even going so far as to interview an actual survivor of the Dora-Mittelbau camp.

“I felt like all my work before that just came to this moment,” he concluded. “Acting the scenes with the voice and feeling connected to what I’ve worked on before."