HBO’s The Sympathizer has got viewers curious whether the series is based on a true story. Does the series adapt real events or a book? Here’s everything you need to know about the inspiration for the series.
Is The Sympathizer based on a true story or a novel?
The Sympathizer is inspired by a novel of the same name written by Viet Thanh Nguyen and also takes some elements from real-life events.
The book was first published in 2015 and became a best-selling novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Even though the narrative of the book, and the series inspired by it, is fictional, there were people and events from the real world that Viet Thanh Nguyen drew from for the story.
Overall, the book tells the grim reality of the Vietnam War using a fictional story, which follows The Captain, a spy loyal to the Communist beliefs of North Vietnam. Joining the police in Saigon, he makes his way up the ranks and becomes a mole. He is the narrator of the book and the series. The Captain’s narration reveals his journey across Vietnam and the United States, from 1975 and beyond.
In 2016, Nguyen told NPR:
“There really were spies in South Vietnam that rose to the very highest ranks of the South Vietnamese bureaucracy and military.”
Nguyen based the character of The Captain on a North Vietnamese spy called Pham Xuan An. Being a mole, he also worked as a staff writer for the New York Herald Tribune, Reuters, and Time magazine, when the war was on.
Talking about him, Nguyen continued to say:
“During his time as a mole, he was promoted to a major general by the North Vietnamese. And he was friends with … all the important American journalists. And they had no idea that he was a communist spy who had studied in the United States.”
Similarly, other real-life instances inspired Nguyen’s espionage thriller story, which turned into the series The Sympathizer.
For more updates, read the breakdown of The Sympathizer Episode 1. Also, go through the description of the new Deadpool & Wolverine footage.
