Hunters season 2 first look: Al Pacino returns, Jennifer Jason Leigh joins the fray for series end

Of all the big, provocative, sometimes risky, sometimes controversial swings Hunters took in its first season, the biggest came at the very end.

The Amazon series — an alternate history drama in which a group of disparate individuals band together to hunt down and exterminate Nazis-in-hiding in the 1970s — revealed that not only is Adolf Hitler alive, but he's been hiding out on a lavish compound in South America, quietly plotting a Fourth Reich in the United States with wife Eva Braun, revealed to be the Colonel (Lena Olin).

Hunters will now return for its second season, which EW can exclusively confirm will be its last, beginning Jan. 13. Creator David Weil says the dictator, to be played by German actor Udo Kier, will have a growing presence on the show as the titular band of hunters scour the globe to wipe him out once and for all.

"For me, as a kid growing up on Long Island, being Jewish, there was always this frustration and anger that Hitler got away with his crimes, that he was never brought to justice, he was never arrested, killed, tried, that he made a decision at the end of his life," Weil tells EW. "So Hunters, being a show about catharsis, about Jewish empowerment, and about wish fulfillment for Jewish kids like me who grew up wanting to reclaim power, season 2, I hope, will be that catharsis."

He wants to assure audiences, "I would only ever invoke Hitler if we're going to deliver justice in some hopefully satisfying way."

As shown in EW's exclusive first-look photos of Hunters season 2, Logan Lerman's Jonah Heidelbaum, Jerrika Hinton's Millie Morris, Josh Radnor's Lonny Flash, Tiffany Boone's Roxy Jones, and Kate Mulvany's Sister Harriet return as the core group of Nazi killers. It's now 1979, two years after season 1, and the team is scattered. Harriet, for one, is off living her own Sound of Music fantasy in a scene that channels the 1965 movie musical involving Nazi soldiers.

Speaking to that sequence with Mulvany, Weil points out, "There has been a history of romanticizing certain elements of war throughout film. So this was an opportunity, I think, to share a Jewish point of view on a very beloved film that included certain characters that I wanted to indict in a way more emphatically than they may have been dealt with at the time. It was both an homage and a disruption of that classic film." That's the spirit of Hunters. "Hunters writ large is about taking stereotypes and exploding them," Weil says.

The reason for the hunters disbanding stems from a particular event that transpired shortly after season 1, but once Jonah and Millie learn that Hitler is still alive, they call on the crew for one last hunt across three continents. Also returning from season 1 are Greg Austin's sadistic incel Travis Leich and — surprise — Al Pacino's Meyer Offerman, the late leader of the hunters who turned out to be a Nazi himself, the infamous "Wolf" Wilhelm Zuchs.

In the season 1 finale, Jonah kills Meyer upon discovering his true identity. Season 2 will now incorporate two timelines: one focused on the hunters' pursuit of Hitler in 1979, and one set in the past as Meyer originates the group.

Weil says it was always the plan to have Meyer's death conclude the first season, but with the development of season 2 being the show's last, he and Pacino found a way to incorporate the character as a means of highlighting the link between him and Jonah.

It's about "how the echoes of the past reverberate loudly in Jonah's present in 1979," Weil explains. "In many ways, Jonah's journey this season, he may find himself right in a similar darkness that Meyer Offerman tried to keep him from, but that Wilhelm Zuchs always exuded and inhabited."

The new faces of season 2 will include Oscar nominee Jennifer Jason Leigh as Chava Apfelbaum, a top Nazi hunter. Weil refrains from saying much of anything about this character, citing "delicious twists and turns." He does, however, make note of Leigh's "ferocity" in the role.

"This is a character who at times may seem very demure, and then we see explosions within her," Weil notes. "At times she can feel explosive, and then there's such vulnerabilities inside of her. Jennifer's a chameleon, and that was what was required for this role... She wears many different hats, many different masks and faces. You never know what you can expect with Chava, and it keeps our hunters on their toes, but there's a real deep rooting with her to some of our characters: emotional, character driven. So there's both beauty and brutality to the character of Chava."

Hunters constantly questions what fighting the most heinous of monsters does to the heroes. Must they become monsters themselves in order to squash a Fourth Reich? Austin's Travis is a centerpiece of this conversation.

"Travis is evil personified, and yet he has the face of the milkman or a paper boy," Weil says of the character, a white American male who found a connection to the Nazi cause. Weil always saw Travis of the same ilk as the white supremacists who marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville, Va. in 2017.

"This is a character who is the face of incels and the neo-Nazi movement today," Weil says. "What's so terrifying about this character is he is the bridge between the Nazis of the '30s and '40s and the Neo-Nazism of today. His arc is a cautionary tale. His arc is a depiction of how white supremacy has mutated and evolved into the evil that it is today."

Weil knows not all of these big swings will pay off for the entire audience. He's well aware of the criticism that's already been sent his way. The organization running the Auschwitz Memorial Museum, which preserves the German Nazi Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in Poland, notably had an adverse reaction to the human chess game Nazi soldiers played with internment camp detainees in season 1. On the flip side, Weil acknowledges the Jewish temple leaders and Holocaust educators he's heard from "who love this show."

Speaking more generally about the response to season 1, Weil says, "I take incredibly seriously that relationship with an audience and that feedback. Season 2 is, to me, a beautiful evolution of the Hunters story. There's another component to that story, which is the audience who watched season 1. I take into account all those thoughts and feelings and notions and reactions, both positive and negative.

"This is what the show is meant to be, right?" he adds. "It's meant to spark conversation, it's meant to raise awareness, it's meant to take viewers on a ride, and most of all, it's designed to be disruptive. It's designed to showcase characters in ways that you have not seen them before. I take such pride in that, there is such opportunity in that — and also danger. This show is a massive risk. We always knew that. So I think you will see that same Hunters spirit, that same ferocity, that same risk taking, that same noisy, mischievous storytelling in season 2."

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