Think of Jonah Hauer-King and you will most likely picture Prince Eric. Last year, the actor played the crush-worthy royal as part of Disney’s ongoing mission to recreate their animated movies in live-action form. At the time, interviews with Hauer-King were written with the kind of breathless anticipation required for the release of a blockbuster. Everything about his life, these profiles suggested, was about to change forever. When I meet Hauer-King, almost a year after that film’s release, I ask: has it? “Not in the way I think they were trying to articulate,” the 28-year-old actor says: it has made getting a job slightly easier, and more people come up to him with their children but mostly, life is ticking away normally for Hauer-King. “Which, honestly,” he points out, “is an enormous relief.”
He seems very relaxed when we meet in Camden near his flat – we were supposed to go for a walk but it is drizzling so: pub – to discuss his new project, The Tattooist of Auschwitz. It is the six-episode television adaptation of Heather Morris’ best-selling novel of the same name. The book has sold over three million copies, and makes for a complicated, harrowing read. The television series is no different. Hauer-King plays Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, who is forced to leave his family and friends to go to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He quickly becomes aware of the horrors of those camps, and not long after that, he is enlisted to work there, tattooing new arrivals with serial numbers Among the bleakness, he falls in love with fellow prisoner Gita (played by Anna Prochniak) whom he tattoos. And so begins an unlikely love story, which plays out over decades.
“I had a good year to try to wrap my head around it, which I probably never did,” Hauer-King says of the project. “But I did try.” He listened to interviews between Morris, who serves as a story consultant on the series, and Sokolov. Sokolov had made testimonials in the Nineties, and Hauer-King watched those to get a sense of his mannerisms. He also read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, both memoirs written about incarceration in concentration camps. He also visited the camp before embarking on the three-month shoot in Bratislava – he had been once before while on a school trip – and considered how “love was able to spark in that place given the horror”. And all that research raised a question, the one that is central to the show: “How do you try not to consent to dehumanisation and keep something for yourself?”
Hauer-King, for his part, pulls off the role of a man both making impossible choices and also falling in love. Harvey Keitel plays the older version of Sokolov, based in Australia and wrestling with survivor’s guilt: the contrast gives the show a real tension.
In the past few months, there have been more on-screen stories about the Holocaust, from Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning Nazi-centred drama The Zone of Interest to One Life, a biopic starring Anthony Hopkins about a Brit who helped transport Jewish children out of Germany safely during the war. “I think it speaks to the fact that this period of history is so enormous,” Hauer-King says. “In trying to understand it, you’re always going to get these different types of stories.” Hauer-King has one of his own: his grandfather emigrated to Canada from Poland in 1928. His cousin in Toronto, who works in the museum sector, was able to dig up family history – papers of various relatives – though that led to a dead end. “I feel connected to that part of my family, whether or not I did this television show. It’s part of my history as well.”
Hauer-King grew up in North London, the son of restaurateur Jeremy King and American psychotherapist Debra Hauer. At 16, he starred in a play written by a schoolmate from Eton (handy!) and which opened at the Edinburgh Fringe before transferring to London (even handier!). He soon signed with an agent. Job done, one might assume, but film roles were not immediately forthcoming so Hauer-King studied at Cambridge, not a terrible back-up plan. He picked up professional work during his theology degree, and was at one point starring in a West End play alongside Kenneth Branagh. TV roles in Howards End and Little Women (he played another crush-worthy character Laurie) followed, though it’s fair to say that The Little Mermaid was his big break.
He is full of praise for his time filming the musical, which wrapped, after Covid-related delays, in 2021: he is still close friends with pop star-turned-actress Halle Bailey, who played Ariel, and he got to work with composer Alan Menken who composed a new song for Eric, “Wild Uncharted Waters”. “I have musical aspirations, and while it’s not that type of music, it definitely scratched an itch,” Hauer-King says. I tell him that I have seen his cover versions on YouTube (Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and, uh, Jessie J’s “Domino”) and though Hauer-King appears horrified, any embarrassment about those teenage recordings are short-lived. “Actually, it was one of happiest times of my life, because I was with my three best friends, doing covers, gigging around here,” he says. “And then acting took over.”
He had just finished The Tattooist of Auschwitz when promo for the The Little Mermaid began and it was a “shock to the system”. Hauer-King still had a buzzcut from filming the Holocaust drama: “I thought it would be the most simple thing in the world,” he says about shaving his hair. “But when I actually did it, I found it quite poignant. Obviously you remember why it was done, as a means to dehumanise you.” And the press tour was unlike anything he had done before. “It had the potential to be overwhelming but I did pretty much all of it with Halle,” he says, “and I felt quite held by her.”
I wonder, after you finish up such a film, whether it makes you keener to chase that blockbuster high or puts you off for life. “The same,” Hauer-King says, unfailingly diplomatic. “Carving out a performance in and amongst what our director [Rob Marshall] used to call the circus was a challenge but a satisfying one. Having said that, it’s really rewarding doing an indie with two or three people in a room just talking.”
That is exactly what Hauer-King did at the start of this year, for a romcom called The Threesome, co-starring Zoey Deutch. There are photos of him onset of Doctor Who – the second season with Ncuti Gatwa at the helm of the Tardis – though given the secrecy around the show, we cannot discuss this. So the future looks bright and varied, which I suspect is exactly the way he wants it. As our conversation ends, and people settle in for lunch at the pub, I tell him that he seems very chill post-The Little Mermaid.
“It was a good lesson in making sure that your ‘real life’ is really solid because then you can go on those fun waves,” Hauer-King says, his feet apparently on firm ground. “And when they are over, you come back to Earth and not have your head be completely scrambled.”
‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’ is available to watch on Sky and NOW TV from 2 May
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
