LONDON, Feb 20 — In a screen career spanning more than five decades, it has taken Al Pacino until now to act in a television series.

He is starring in Hunters, a new show for Amazon Prime that is due to be released on Friday.

The series, about a band of Nazi hunters in New York in the 1970s, is inspired by a true story — a "love letter” to the show creator’s late grandmother who survived Holocaust.

"I never did this sort of long 10 episodes. So it’s like doing like, I think, about a 12-hour film because it is about 12 hours of film,” Pacino, who turns 80 in April, told Reuters.

"This is a crazy story, too, by the way... Crazy horror, really scary stuff. And also heavy, deep, tragic emotion... it runs the gamut,” said Pacino, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at this month’s Academy Awards for his role in The Irishman.

Show creator David Weil said he wanted to tell his grandmother’s story, the experiences during the war that she had told him about as a child.

"At such a young age, they felt like the stuff of comic books and superheroes,” he said.

"The onus is now on us, on the next generation, to continue their story and further their story. And so Hunters is really a love letter to her.

"It’s this desire to propel her story forward into this next generation and to educate people on what the Holocaust is and what people went through so that we can try and prevent this from ever happening again.” — Reuters