Georgia Hunter and Thomas Kail (‘We Were the Lucky Ones’) explain how Hunter’s family never discussed their story [Exclusive Video Interview]

Georgia Hunter didn’t know much about her family’s story of survival during the Holocaust (that would eventually become “We Were the Lucky Ones”) until she was a teenager because they really didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t until after her grandfather Addy passed away that she began to hear some of those stories. “That left me with a lot of curiosity and some of those questions were answered five or six years later at a family reunion in Massachusetts. One night at that reunion, I found myself around a picnic table out back listening to stories about the greater Kurc family narrative and they were stories that just blew my mind,” she tells Gold Derby during our recent webchat (watch the exclusive video interview above). It wasn’t until several years later that she would start to write these stories down and begin doing the research that led to her book being written.

Thomas Kail came to this project as a longtime friend of Hunter and her husband. “Like most other show business stories, this one started at summer camp in Alderson, West Virginia in 1992,” he says. At Camp Greenbrier, Kail met a kid from Richmond, Virginia named Robert Farinholt who he became fast friends with and would later meet Hunter while a student at the University of Virginia. Over the years, he began to hear bits and pieces of her family’s story until Hunter published her book in 2017. It resonated with Kail and he began to envision the story as a limited series. “I’m a descendant of Jews from Poland and Russia and it was a story that because of the specificity and detail that Georgia lent to this novel that is based in deep, deep research and fact, I started to see my own family and I thought about the idea in this new limited series form which was starting to become more popular.”

“We Were the Lucky Ones,” which is currently streaming on Hulu, is an adaptation of Hunter’s novel about her European ancestors, the Kurcs, a Jewish family in Poland that gets separated all over the world as World War II plays out in Europe and their determination to be a whole unit again. The series also stars Joey King, Logan Lerman, Robin Weigert, Lior Ashkenazi, Sam Woolf, Hadas Yaron, Amit Rahav, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Eva Feiler and Moran Rosenblatt.

Kail is no stranger to the Emmys as he’s already won three of them. In 2016 he won in both Best Special Class Program and Best Directing of a Variety Special for his work on “Grease Live!” That same year he won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for his staging of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton.” Five years later in 2021 he took home the Emmy for Best Variety Special (Pre-Recorded) for “Hamilton.” He was also one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors as part of the creative team behind “Hamilton” alongside Miranda, Alex Lacamoire and Andy Blankenbuehler.