Our last digital cover for Popternative Magazine for the month of July features actor Lucas Englander who stars as Martin in the second season of the drama series, Nine Perfect Strangers. Nicole Kidman reprises her role as Masha Dmitrichenko, but the new season takes viewers to a different location with new guests and staff. As the guests try and heal themselves over one week, Masha pushes them – and those working with her – to the brink.

Season 2 premiered on Hulu on May 21 and the season finale recently dropped on July 2. In the latest season, nine new strangers join Masha in the Austrian Alps for a wellness retreat. Henry Golding, Lena Olin, Annie Murphy, Christine Baranski, King Princess, Murray Bartlett, Dolly de Leon, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Mark Strong, and Aras Aydin make up the cast. Lucas’ character, Martin, is not however, one of the guests at the retreat, but is the pharmacologist working alongside Masha.

In our exclusive conversation, Lucas shares his journey into joining the series, preparing to play a complex character, and what new acting and storytelling experiences he gained from this project.

Exclusive photos for Popternative Magazine by Jonathan Puente
PR: Shelter PR

What was your initial reaction to booking the role of Martin for Season 2 of Nine Perfect Strangers? Were you aware at the time who else would be starring in the new season?

Lucas: I was aware of those who were announced already, but I didn’t know that Mark [Strong] and Lena [Olin] were going to join. I was super excited about the project. I called my teenage friend, Sebastian, because it was John Levine directing, and we both just loved his movies growing up, and so there was that happiness. And then there was also a part of me that was just like, “okay, I’m going to be around of a lot of actors who have a certain kind of status in our world.”

And I was very lucky that a moment before, I shot a series called The Day of the Jackal with Eddie Redmayne, and Eddie was an incredible partner and just an incredible person. He would stand up for people’s creativity and saw everybody as equal. And so part of me, coming from that experience, was like, “I don’t want to look at these actors who I know and create something out of them that’s different than just you know any other person I might meet on the street.” And so that’s how I kind of felt. I was like, “let me just try to just be there in the moment and focus on the work.”

Martin is an interesting character because he’s not part of the guests, but we learn about him as the season progresses. How would you describe him, and do you honestly see him as evil?

Lucas: He’s somebody who wants to please. He wants to please because he thinks that is how he’s going to be accepted, and how his worth is going to be defined. And pleasing to him means something specific. It means precision; it means that things need to be completely clear, and that he has to be in control. He believes that if he is this way, then he will be loved. And I think Martin is looking for something, but he doesn’t really know what. I don’t think he’s evil. I don’t think evil is really a thing you can truly be in the world. Actions can be evil, we can be lost, we can desire things and make horrible choices to achieve them is what I think. I think just like a lot of people, Martin might not have the safe space to express his anxieties. And if he would have that safe space, then maybe his actions would come from more compassion.

Episode seven is a particularly important episode for Martin as we see him unravel while he hallucinates. What was the process like filming that scene? How did you get into that headspace?

Lucas: One of the building blocks for me, for Martin, was literature on oppression, and the question of, when you oppress somebody for long enough, could certain actions of resistance potentially stir greater violence than the let’s call it “initial conditions of oppression”? How do you get out of that choke hold? And so I read, for example, a book called The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, and I read literature by Angela Davis. And these books informed a certain kind of anger inside of Martin, a kind of frustration about his state in which he doesn’t know how to be his real self anymore. Somehow, in the process of him becoming who he is, who we see on screen, he lost his impulsive, honest self. And so, I saw that scene as two things, one, this fight through that oppression towards liberation, and two, the question of, when am I actually myself? When am I actually real? When is this really my full human experience?

Are there new experiences you gained from an acting perspective from Nine Perfect Strangers you might bring to future roles?

Lucas: Yeah, definitely. The first thing for myself, because with Martin, I let myself fall into him because I wanted to experience everything he’s going through for my own experience of being human. To confront all these social anxieties that I have deep down inside myself and everything that I know of the world in that direction. Everything that I know of that form of oppression of the mind, and conditioning that keeps us from believing that we’re allowed to love ourselves and love others and support each other on the way. I fell so far into Martin I didn’t know myself anymore for quite some time. And that’s okay. That happens, I don’t want to shun that, it taught me so much, and I don’t want anyone to feel bad if it happens to them. But I think for the future, I want to create a little more of a safe space for myself. If a role is dragging me to a place, I need to remember that there is a pullback, be it on the weekend, or when the shooting ends on the day, or between takes. Just remember to totally let go into myself as well while creating.

And second, to always ask the question, “what are we really telling?” And to think about the collaboration process with the creators and creatives. Having constant conversations throughout a project really helps with understanding the overall process and what we want to tell as a whole. Storytelling through performance is a constantly developing thing. And I think in the future, I want more of that collaborative approach, working together, feeling together, daring to look for meaning together. 

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Season 2 of Nine Perfect Strangers is streaming on Hulu.

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