Gregg Sulkin: 'My Jerusalem bar mitzvah was the best day of my life'

Seeing a mezuzah on a door frame makes him “smile a bit” because, “it’s not just that’s an important thing to have in a Jewish person’s life, but the fact that we are able to do it at all. Not so long ago there was a very high possibility that the Jewish people wouldn’t even exist in Europe.”

And, obviously, he loves the JC. It was, after all, thanks to this newspaper that he got his big break when his mum was alerted to an advert looking for Jewish boys of bar mitzvah age.

At the time, Sulkin was more focused on football. He played for West Ham, QPR and even Tottenham youth teams (which, as a passionate Arsenal fan he describes as ‘interesting’). But as the film in question was Sixty Six — a comedy-drama about a boy whose bar mitzvah falls on the same day as the 1966 World Cup Final— it seemed serendipitous.

“There was a big open casting call and they saw something in me,” recalls the former Highgate School student, who is now 31. “There were six or seven callbacks and it seemed to go on for ages. But then I ended up being the lead of a movie in which Helena Bonham Carter played my mum and Eddie Marsan my dad. I never looked back.

“If it hadn’t been for that job, I wouldn’t be an actor today. I consider myself very fortunate because people believed in me. I know that there are many actors in the world who are incredibly talented and who haven’t had the breaks, I have. ”

His talent quickly won fans on both side of the Atlantic and aged 17 he moved to LA by himself after bagging roles in a succession of teen shows including Wizards of Waverly Place, Pass the Plate and Pretty Little Liars before moving onto the MTV comedy Faking It and Marvel series Runaways and, in 2013,  thriller Another which was filmed in Spain.

“I think when you are young you have no fear,” he says of moving to America at such a young age. “I didn’t know anybody in the United States when I moved there so it was one of those experiences where I knew I was going to either sink or swim. Thankfully I found some good people.

“I continue to just put my head down and work hard — be professional, turn up on time, know my lines and just try to be a better actor.”

He has a huge dedicated fan base in America — and an incredible 7 million followers on Instagram — but World on Fire is his first British television series and he has made quite an impression.

He plays daring Jewish RAF pilot David in the multi-lingual series — Poles play Poles, French actors play and Germans the Germans — which looks at the war from the point of view of ordinary people on all sides.

It also shows how David faces low-level antisemitism from some of his fellow British pilots and how he is determined to put a brave face on the experience by keeping his humour at all times. At one point he says you “have to laugh when half the world hates you” for being Jewish.

At first David is a lady’s man but, as the series goes on, we see him crash land in occupied France where he meets and falls in love with Henriette, played by Eugenie Derouand, a nurse working for the French resistance who is hiding her Jewish heritage as well as her important work.

Like Sulkin, the character David is proud of his Jewishness and there is one touching scene where he does the Friday night prayers: “I’ve had enough Shabbat dinners to get them right!” At another point, a brush with the danger of being in occupied France reminds us just how dangerous being a Jew can be.

“It means a great, great deal to me to play this character,” says Sulkin. “And to my family too. My grandparents are no longer with us but they fought in and experienced those horrendous days. I am very proud to be a  Jew representing a Jewish character on television, particularly one who has so much grit and determination and  who is fighting the good fight.”

Sulkin believes his family name was Anglicised during the war from the more obviously foreign Zulkin. “People sometimes say, ‘you have a cool last name’ but I know that it had to be changed from the original Polish because it could potentially be the difference between life and death,” he says.

He never met his property developer father Graham’s parents (his mother Janice is a convert to Judaism) but working in England on the drama has meant he’s discovered that just like the fictional Daniel, his paternal grandfather fought the fascists.

Bobby Sulkin was a tough East End boxer who was a member of The 62 Group, a militant, broad-based coalition of anti-fascists . He points me to a brief description of him he’s found on Google which describes how his grandfather was in a 1962 brawl with the BNP on Ridley Road. It reads: “I looked around and saw Bobby Sulkin, a former East End boxer, hit a Nazi so hard that his feet left the ground. The Nazi had been a pro boxer and a Nazi bully boy for years. Now he was in the gutter where he belonged.”

At one point Sulkin filmed a scene in which his character also punches a Nazi. “I am gutted that it was cut because it would have mirrored what my grandfather did in real life,” he says.

As for the Jewface debate —   recently reignated by David Baddiel’s piece on Oppenheimer  in this paper — Sulkin says that as long as everyone does their research, he doesn’t believe Jews need to be played by Jews.

“It’s a complicated one because all communities want theirs to be represented by someone accurately and authentically,” he says.

“But although I am extremely proud to be Jewish and play a Jewish character, I believe that if a non-Jew really wants to play a Jewish character,  as long as they really educate themselves, learn about our history and heritage, try and understand what it means to be  Jewish, they should be able to. That said, being Jewish is a help.

“While many of the scenes were my character’s emotions, they came from my heart too. There were times when the producer spoke to me about my thoughts on scenes and there were a couple of times where I just wanted to make sure that the Jewish community was represented correctly.’

He actually isn’t the only Jewish star in the show — leading man Jonah Hauer-King plays the decidedly non-Jewish soldier Harry Chase. “We are both Jewish and Arsenal fans which was a great basis for a friendship,” says Sulkin.  “He’s a great dude who welcomed me onto the show with open arms.”

His character lives in what was one of the darkest of times for Jews, but Sulkin is mindful that he needs to fight contemporary antisemitism too.

“I’ve noticed more and more of it in recent years,” he says. “Even my friends make remarks about Jews they think are funny, or which  because I’m Jewish and their friend  they think they can get away with.

“I don’t think they are being intentionally disrespectful but I do think that when we hear antisemitic remarks we need to call them out.

“People talk easily about Jews  being tight or stingy, and it is harmful.  Even my best friend said something about Jews and business which was just really ignorant. I think it’s important that we protect our reputation.

“The Jewish community I know is charitable, family-orientated, loving, caring hard-working and open to people of all ethnicities and religions. This is something that should be acknowledged and praised.”

Sulkin was in Los Angeles — where he has been renovating a house and showing his progress to those 7,000,000  Instagram followers – when Kanye West began his rant against Jews.

“I surprised at how quickly the rhetoric escalated. It worried me a lot and I was pleased that it didn’t seem to be just Jewish people who were concerned,” he says.

“I was grateful to see that some companies reacted too.”

Anyone who doesn’t think Jew-hate is rising is being naive, he adds. “A few years ago, my dad bought a house in an Eastern European country. He didn’t go back for a few months but when he did,  there were swastikas all over it. Antisemitism absolutely exists and that’s why Jewish people have to talk about it and why representation of Jewish people on television shows, in our schools and in the media is so important.

“The number of Holocaust survivors is diminishing, sadly.  So it is down to us, the younger generation, to remember and tell what happened.One of my good friends works in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington — she feels  it is her duty. And I am very pleased to do my own small part in making sure what took place is not forgotten.”

Series two of ‘World on Fire’ continues on BBC One on Sunday nights and the whole series can also be seen on iPlayer