Saul Rubinek has had a long & distinguished career and 2020 will bring with it a co-starring role one of the year’s most anticipated tv series. Rubinek will star as weapons expert Murray Markowitz opposite Al Pacino in Jordan Peele’s Amazon Original series Hunters (February 21). Inspired by true events, the drama features a “diverse band of Nazi Hunters in 1977 New York City.” The powerful series focuses on several issues of morality, including – “if you hunt monsters, do you risk becoming one yourself?” Rubinek’s daughter Hannah Reid Rubinek plays his on-screen daughter.
Hunters holds personal meaning for Rubinek as well as the son of Holocaust survivors. Their experiences led to his writing & producing the award-winning documen
Saul Rubinek has had a long & distinguished career and 2020 will bring with it a co-starring role one of the year’s most anticipated tv series. Rubinek will star as weapons expert Murray Markowitz opposite Al Pacino in Jordan Peele’s Amazon Original series Hunters (February 21). Inspired by true events, the drama features a “diverse band of Nazi Hunters in 1977 New York City.” The powerful series focuses on several issues of morality, including – “if you hunt monsters, do you risk becoming one yourself?” Rubinek’s daughter Hannah Reid Rubinek plays his on-screen daughter.
Hunters holds personal meaning for Rubinek as well as the son of Holocaust survivors. Their experiences led to his writing & producing the award-winning documentary, So Many Miracles (CBC/PBS), which chronicled his parents’ reunion with the people who saved their lives during the Holocaust. Penguin Books also published his non-fiction book of the same title, which also included an account of his parents growing up in Poland during the war.
Rubinek himself was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, where his father ran a Yiddish repertory theater company. He was nine months old when he arrived with his parents as immigrants to Canada. Rubinek spoke Yiddish & French before English, but when he was eight years old, he began acting in English on stage. During his early stage career, he was involved in the development of over 50 Canadian plays as an actor & director in Toronto theaters.
Rubinek’s work as an actor in film & television spans four decades. Some of his credits include Joel & Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Unforgiven, Tony Scott & Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance, and over 60 other feature films. His tv credits include series regular roles in Frasier and Warehouse 13 as well as guest-starring roles in dozens of series including Billions, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, For All Mankind, Grey’s Anatomy and Blue Bloods.
Rubinek has also directed two films produced by his wife & producing partner Elinor Reid – Jerry and Tom starring Joe Mantegna and Sam Rockwell (Sundance, 1998) and the award-winning independent film Cruel but Necessary. He also directed two films for Paramount and Showtime – Bleacher Bums, a film adaptation of the play about Chicago Cubs baseball fans and Club Land starring Emmy nominee Alan Alda.
He has also continued to work in theater as an actor, director and writer in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. He directed and performed the Canadian premiere of Marc Neikrug’s Through Roses, a play for an actor and an eight-piece chamber ensemble. In collaboration with Canada’s Royal Conservatory of Music, Rubinek has performed the piece in Toronto, Ottawa, New York, and in London with the English Chamber Orchestra.
Most recently, he performed at LA’s Mark Taper Forum in Ethan Coen’s new play A Play is a Poem, directed by Neil Pepe. He also plans to perform in the play in its New York premiere at the Atlantic Theater in the spring of 2020.
As a playwright, his first play, Terrible Advice, directed by Frank Oz and starring Scott Bakula & Sharon Horgan, had its world premiere at London’s Menier Chocolate Factor Theater in the fall of 2011. The play was also translated into German and premiered in Berlin in 2013.
Rubinek is in the process of developing his newest play, All in the Telling. It is an intensely personal exploration about how the telling of family history stories impacts three generations — stories about the Holocaust, secrets kept and revealed, miraculous coincidence, unexpected bravery and outright lies.
