Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Robert Downey Jr. said filming this series was a welcome contrast to his role in Oppenheimer (2023): "I knew that playing Strauss, in 'Oppenheimer,' was going to be like picking fly shit out of pepper - that it was going to be extremely exacting, that it was going to be... not confining, but liberating by its varied implicit limitations of what my usual toolbox is. So I had a feeling that, like a coiled spring, 'Sympathizer' would be my unwind."