Lucas Englander is pleased to have been wrong about Los Angeles.

The 32-year-old Austrian actor, who has been Paris-based for the last four years, came out to L.A. for press for his Hulu show “Nine Perfect Strangers.” With a role on a hit show led by Nicole Kidman, a larger presence in Hollywood can be expected to follow — and Englander wanted to see what all the fuss was about. 

“I came to understand what this industry here is, to try to figure out what my part in it is and how much I want to be a part in it and what I feel and who I get to know,” says the actor. “And it’s really interesting because I came here with the prejudice of L.A. being a very superficial place where everything’s about waste and about consumerism.

“And then I encounter all these people and they show me the exact opposite,” he adds. “I’m having the most interesting political discussions and everything feels so beautiful. I’ve seen some of the best movies I’ve ever seen in my entire life. So I could almost say I’m glad I came with such low expectations because I’m being filled up with infinite love.”

“Nine Perfect Strangers,” based on the 2018 novel by Liane Moriarty and created for television by David E. Kelley, is set at a wellness resort where, as the title suggests, a group of strangers arrive for transformation. 

Englander was unfamiliar with the show before receiving an audition for the second season for Martin, a pharmacologist at the wellness resort. 

The role of therapy in “Nine Perfect Strangers” was what initially drew him in: at the time of the audition, he was two years into his own journey of self-discovery with therapy.

“[Martin] is very good at masking his own pains and his own feeling of being a failure, which we get to know more and more throughout the story. And so I found it really interesting, and this is going to sound strange maybe, but what really sparked my interest in him is just patriarchal maleness. And how I, for a long time, maybe up until I shot the series, also thought that I need to be somebody else to be able to be loved,” Englander says. “And that’s something I try to explore a lot, these parts of myself that are needy, the parts that don’t want to belong. To finally be worthy and have power. And I wanted to find out what that is.”

He admits that he may have dove a bit too far into the role, and that up until recently it’s hard for him to think of the time of filming. 

“I accidentally [went] into him a little bit too much and I couldn’t get out,” he says. “I became Martin for that period. I forgot to be me.”

Englander’s path into acting began when a music teacher requested an improvisation that hit close to home. Growing up, Englander wanted to be a diplomat and planned to study law and politics, and wanted to enroll in a military academy. His friend group was “people who were all lost and who all tried to prove themselves by constantly going further into doing dumb things,” including drugs, and one of his closest friends became addicted.

“I was at school and out of nowhere my music teacher, who didn’t know anything about what was going on in my private life, was like, ‘Lucas, I want you and two others to do an improvisation,’ and she whispered into my ear, ‘I want you to play somebody who’s addicted to this drug, and I want you to tell your friends that you need help,’” he recalls.

“What she didn’t know was that that was a really important story for me at that moment. I felt like for the first time after being a kid, I spoke some truth. And that feeling of speaking some truth  was really important to me because I was very good at masking. I was very good at constantly pretending like I’m above everything and nothing touches me. That’s what got me to acting, and that’s what keeps me there or makes me explore it more.”

With “Nine Perfect Strangers” finished for the season, Englander is looking ahead to various film roles he can’t quite yet discuss — but which continue to fuel his interests in questioning his place in the world. 

“They’re all wonderful movies because they touch on subjects that I want to speak about, which are overwork and the stresses of our society to constantly push us into climbing the ladder. They are about modern colonization of taking over agriculture in different places that have less money. They are about diplomacy,” he says. “They’re all in this direction of stuff that I want to explore.”