Ben Foster Lost 60 Pounds for Barry Levinson’s Holocaust Biopic ‘The Survivor’: ‘I Wanted to See How Far I Could Go’
variety.comSasha Urban editorIn the late 1940s, when Barry Levinson was a young boy, his family hosted a guest — his grandmother’s brother.
The man’s name was Simka, and he shared a room with Levinson for a two-week period before moving away. Levinson remembers the man thrashing in his sleep and mumbling in a foreign language for some reason, but, as a young boy, he couldn’t understand why.It wasn’t until years later that he learned that Simka was a survivor of the Holocaust, and his fits were a symptom of what is now recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Those memories came flooding back to Levinson when he first read Justine Juell Gillmer’s screenplay of “The Survivor.”Levinson’s latest film, premiering April 27 on HBO, stars Ben Foster as Harry Haft, a real man who survived Auschwitz by boxing other prisoners at the behest of the Nazis.
After making it out alive, Haft made headlines in 1953 when he boxed Rocky Marciano in an attempt to get the attention of his lost love, Leah (Dar Zuzovsky).
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