EXCLUSIVE: Dark star Oliver Masucci didn’t know what he was getting in for when he signed up for The German, Lionsgate and Yes TV’s Israeli series about the hunt for Josef Mengele.

While filming on the show was distressing enough given its heavy subject matter, Masucci tells us he felt “co-traumatized” by the Israel-Hamas war that was raging around him as cameras rolled. On some days, as many as 40 to 60 rockets were dropped during production and the team were forced to spend lots of time in bomb shelters, Masucci explained.

“The inner movement and inner world of [The German’s main character] Uri, who is also a traumatized person, is conflicted because he wants to put everything away and move forward with his life,” said Masucci on the eve of The German’s Series Mania premiere. “But you get co-traumatized while you’re there and start acting like the Israelis. I tried to stay focused on succeeding in playing this role in Hebrew and this somehow matches with Uri’s inner intentions.”

Masucci got used to spending hours stuck in shelters as bombs rained down last summer. On the day he left, there was another major attack on Israel and when he phoned the crew to see if they were OK he recalled they told him: “Don’t open the news, open a bottle of wine.” But he said they ploughed on with the production and Masucci eventually came to see his role in The German as an act of protest. “We have a lot of left-wing activists who claim the Jews were not [in Israel] 3,000 years ago but I don’t believe in this narrative,” he added. “So for me instead of going on rallies I did the show.”

From the creative team behind Fauda and Tehran, The German follows Uri and Anna (Ania Bukstein), who meet after World War Two and move to a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee. But when the Israeli secret service recruits Uri for a dangerous mission in Germany, he is forced to return home and infiltrate a cell of SS veterans with the aim of locating the Nazi war criminal, Mengele.

Mengele’s actions were some of the most disturbing of the terrifying Nazi regime. Nicknamed the ‘Angel of Death’, he became known for performing deadly experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, yet he was never tried for his crimes and died of drowning while having a heart attack in 1979.

Many of Masucci’s roles have been in projects about the Nazis, including his turn as Adolf Hitler in the 2015 adaptation of satirical novel Look Who’s Back, but he told us he doesn’t set out to specifically land these roles.

“It happens when you are German,” he explained. “But I have tried not to play too many Nazis in my life. As I played ‘the big guy’ [Hitler] I shouldn’t play the others anymore. I completed the set.”

For The German, he said his biggest challenge was learning Hebrew. “I kept saying this wasn’t possible because I’d never spoken Hebrew in my life but they kept on insisting,” he added. “So it was a tough game. The Hebrew symbols were transliterated into English and in my head I had to then transform it into the German syllables so it was a double transformation for me. And I had to learn how to pronounce the words.”

‘Dark’ success

The result is Lionsgate’s first ever Israeli drama and Masucci’s second in two years in competition at Series Mania, following Beta Film’s Herrhausen – The Banker and the Bomb, which won an award last year for best writing.

Masucci credits Netflix’s smash German sci-fi thriller Dark, which along with Squid Game, Lupin and Money Heist led a non-English-language revolution, as catapulting his career to the next level.

“It opened up a market for everyone and due to that I can work worldwide,” said Masucci, who was recently filming a show in Iceland and said he was spotted everywhere because “you’re that guy from Dark.“

“People are no longer so dependent on seeing things in their own language,” he added.

The German is in competition tonight at Series Mania and Masucci is in Lille. The show from Moshe Zonder, Assaf Gil and Ronit Weiss-Berkowitz is competing against the likes of Peacock’s Long Bright River starring Amanda Seyfried, Sky drama Mussolini: Son of the Century and Cooper Raiff’s Hal & Harper.