John Slattery soldiers up for historic role in ‘Nuremberg’

Tall, lean and topped with a crown of snow-white hair, Boston’s own John Slattery has – on stage, television and in films – managed a spectacular career playing smart, commanding and occasionally devious men. In Friday’s “Nuremberg,” a historical look back at the final reckoning for the defeated, monstrous Nazi leaders, executed for their “crimes against humanity,” Slattery, 63, is one of the key, if little known today, players: Burton C. Andrus. While Adolf Hitler and new wife Eva Braun, Joseph Goebbels, his wife and their six children and Heinrich Himmler committed suicide, it was decided that the captured Nazis would be tried by the Allies – France Germany, Russia and the US – in a world court whose daily proceedings in 1946 reverberated around the world. “Nuremberg” shows how complicated and necessary that was. Andrus, Slattery learned, “was first and foremost, a decorated soldier! With a great career, who was determined to carry out the assignment, knowing that the eyes of the world were on him – and everybody else – as they were trying to bring these people to trial. “It was a high wire act that they all had to try to carry out without screwing it up. “Burton Andrus wrote his own book and I read that. Then I read ‘The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,’ the book (about Hermann Göring – Russell Crowe – with Rami Malek’s psychiatrist) on which the script was based. And (writer-director) James Vanderbilt’s script obviously. “We talked about what parts of his personality were useful to the story. I mean, he was a peacock. He wore one of those chrome helmets that (US Army commander) George Patton wore. He wore one of those a lot. He had his riding crop. “We left out the chrome helmet because there wasn’t time to explain that choice sufficiently so that it wasn’t a distraction. “But I had to come up with a way to understand the emotion. Someone said, ‘Imagine how tired everybody was by the end of the war.’ I mean, if nothing else, just how exhausted they all were at the end of this war. “And how much they all wanted to just go home. Like, ‘Can’t we just get rid of these people and go home?’ “I’m sure that’s how a lot of them felt. But that wasn’t the assignment. That wasn’t the job. And they all saw the importance of the assignment. “So it was just another mission that they had to finish and put their personal feelings aside.” What makes Slattery say yes to a role? “You look for the potential in it because you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Whether it’s directing, acting or whatever, you can only hope that it turns out well. “Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.” “Nuremberg” is in theaters Friday