It’s a wrap!
Lior Raz dishes on Season 3 of ‘Fauda’
Season three of the world-famous Israeli television drama Fauda, the story of a counterterrorism unit, has just wrapped. The third season is set to debut on the YES cable network in Israel in November and to become available on Netflix about four months later.
While the cast and crew are under strict orders not to reveal any spoilers, they did post photos of the wrap party on their Instagram feed, and the show’s co-creators – Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz (who is also its star) – have been making the rounds of talk shows to celebrate.
The big departure in the third season is that a significant portion of the action moves from the West Bank to Gaza. Asked about that by Ynet, Raz said, “First of all, we live in the State of Israel, but we know what goes on in Gaza... the stories start in the West Bank and move to Gaza, then return to Israel... the inspiration is from real life.”
This series was developed and shown in Israel on the YES cable network and has been available with subtitles on Netflix for years, where it has become an unexpected international hit, and one which reportedly is a guilty pleasure for some Palestinians. Asked which side will identify more with the series, Israelis or Palestinians, Raz said, “The magic in Fauda is that everyone sees something else.”
Arabs from around the world often contact him, he said, including Israeli-Arabs. “The other day, someone from Algeria wrote to me,” he said. He added, “At the end of the day, Avi and I wrote the series and we’re not Palestinians, we’re not Arabs. And there are certainly those who don’t like it, from both the Israeli side and Arab side... but that’s OK, it’s art and those who connect to it, connect to it.”
The fact that it is an international hit has not added to the pressure or changed the way he and Issacharoff work on it, he insisted.
Asked to describe some of the season’s more complex scenes, he went mum. He would say, though, that this season “is much more emotional than the previous ones, and I think it took some coping for us as actors, I feel that in this season, I did some things I didn’t do in the first seasons.
In response to a question on how they keep the plot secret, Raz joked, “Avi and I beat the actors who talk,” but went on to say, “Fauda is a family. You know what? That’s the answer. Really, we get together outside of the set, there is a great atmosphere. Everyone knows how important the spoilers are, and no one lets it get out because everyone feels part of the process of this series .... You know, my wife doesn’t even know the plot of this season. We don’t tell, because in every episode, crazy things happen and we don’t want [to ruin it].”
Thanks to the success of the series, Raz now has an international career and just finished filming the international thriller, 6 Underground, with Ryan Reynolds. On a big production like that, Raz said, “Only the director will talk to you about your performance. Here, the sound man can tell you you’ve gotten fat, the boom man can say, ‘You didn’t do the scene that well.’”
But while in Hollywood there is all kinds of on-set pampering, “The family is here.”