WARNING! This article contains major SPOILERS for Hunters season 2!Hunters season 2’s introduction to Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character Chava brilliantly tricks audiences with expectations from her terrifying Quentin Tarantino role. Jennifer Jason Leigh joined the cast of Hunters season 2 in the role of Chava Apfelbaum, the previously presumed-dead sister of Jonah’s grandmother Ruth. Chava spends Hunters season 2 getting to know her great-nephew Jonah while prioritizing her decades-long mission to track down Adolf Hitler and bring him to justice, making her one of the TV show’s greatest Nazi hunters.
The first scene in Hunters’ season 2 premiere flashes back to 1972, depicting Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character as she confronts a toy shop owner in Austria. Presenting herself as a menacing figure, Chava begins asking the man whether he’s Jewish, which initially suggests that her character is a Nazi. However, Chava’s sleeve slides down and her tattoo number from the camps appears on her arm, telling the shop owner that she’s a Holocaust survivor. Revealing that she’s on the same side as Jonah and the hunters, Chava’s demeanor shifts as she asks whether Adolf Hitler (Udo Kier) passed through the town, with the confrontation ending as she gouges the man’s eyes and places them on a butter sculpture.
Hunters S2’s Opening Scene Flips JJL’s Villainous The Hateful Eight Character
The dialogue of the opening scene of Hunters season 2 is meant to be vague enough that it appears Chava could be a villainous Nazi terrorizing Jewish people in Austria, which is also effectively accomplished due to expectations from Leigh’s last major period piece character. In Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, Jennifer Jason Leigh portrayed the post-Civil War era racist gangster Daisy Domergue, who is one of the actor’s most vile characters. The intense villainy of her character from Tarantino’s movie thus helped Hunters season 2’s opening scene use expectations of Leigh in an evil role, which made the quick subversion of these expectations upon the reveal of Chava’s identity even better.
Many of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s film roles in the 2010s followed the trend of her portraying sinister characters, which also makes it refreshing to see her portray a top Nazi hunter in Hunters. Given how incredible Leigh is at playing monsters like The Hateful Eight’s Daisy, it’s equally exciting to see her take on a complex hero like Chava, who is starkly different from her Tarantino character. Instead of The Hateful Eight’s bigoted villain who is hunted, she gets to be the vengeful hunter of racist Nazis in the Amazon original TV show. She’s still a killer in Hunters but, this time around, her character is one of the good guys.
Why Hunters Season 2 Changed Chava’s Fate
Hunters season 1 explained that Ruth’s younger sister Chava died during a sadistic human chess game at the concentration camp, so it was a major twist for Hunters to reveal that she actually survived. Chava surviving the camps added another complex layer to Jonah’s family history, especially considering she knew about Ruth and Jonah but never told them she was alive. Chava could have been a brand-new unknown character who had survived the camps, so making her Jonah’s great-aunt was very purposeful to the final season’s story.
Not only did Chava’s survival allow Jonah to reconnect with his faith, family, and culture under her guidance, but it also reaffirmed that he wasn’t alone. After Ruth and The Wolf/Meyer’s deaths, Jonah was alone until he found Clara, with his introduction to Chava giving his return to the hunt far more meaning. Chava’s sacrifice gave Jonah the hope and purpose he needed to carry on the hunt both during and after Hunters season 2. Jonah never got to hunt Nazis alongside Ruth because she kept him from that part of her life, so hunting alongside Chava made up for this loss while establishing their work as the “family business.”