Taylor Kitsch and Michael C. Hall Star In a New Netflix Series You’ve Never Heard Of
Streaming giant Netflix pumps out hundreds of movies and shows every year (more than 370 in 2019 alone). Keeping up with all the new releases can be a challenge. Case in point: the new eight-episode Netflix series The Defeated, which arrived without much fanfare on August 19. The new show, which is set in post-WWII Berlin, has a stacked cast including Dexter’s Michael C. Hall and Friday Night Lights alum Taylor Kitsch. It just might be your next must-watch series.
Taylor Kitsch plays a cop in postwar Berlin in ‘The Defeated’
The Defeated takes place in 1946. Kitsch plays a Brooklyn cop named Max McLaughlin who is helping to set up a police force in Berlin following the Nazi’s defeat in World War II. He clashes with a German crime lord while also trying to find his brother, who has returned to Germany after the war on a personal mission of revenge.
Last year, Kitsch spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the series, which was then called Shadowplay.
“The violence didn’t stop after the war,” the True Detective actor said. “Everything just went rogue. I got here a few weeks before we started shooting and went to Berlin to see all the sites for myself. I took a week and went to Auschwitz to study that. You can look at these pictures all day but being there you have a sense of the gravity of it all.”
Michael C. Hall and Tuppence Middleton also appear in ‘The Defeated’
In addition to Kitsch, The Defeated also features Michael C. Hall in a small role as Tom Franklin, one of Max’s fellow officers, and Logan Marshall-Green as Max’s brother Moritz. Mank’s Tuppence Middleton plays Tom’s daughter Claire and Sebastian Koch plays gang leader Warner “Engelmacher” Gladow. Well-known German actor Nina Hoss, who has also appeared in Homeland, plays Elise Garten, a former linguistics teacher who joins the police force.
Kitsch told The Hollywood Reporter that Hoss was “one of my favorite actors or actresses I ever worked with.”
“I’m a fan for life,” he added. “She is just incredibly giving. No ego. There are actors out there that are more worried about themselves than the scene alone or reaching the potential of a scene. She wants to reach the potential of the scene.”
Is ‘The Defeated’ based on a true story?
Despite its historical setting, The Defeated is not based on a true story. The characters Kitsch and the other actors play are fictional creations, though the setting — a postwar Berlin divided into four sectors occupied by the Americans, French, British, and the Soviet Union — is real.
The Defeated is currently streaming on Netflix.
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