Hanging out with Lior
IHAVE BRILLIANT news for Fauda fans: Doron may be shot, battered and bashed about but he is alive and series five is now on the cards. I managed to catch up with Lior Raz, the Fauda co-creator and actor who plays the indestructible Doron and his writing partner Avi Issacharoff, at the Our Crowd summit in Jerusalem earlier this month.
Israeli television has become such a surprising success that it is now being grouped in with other “start-up nation” activity. Leading the charge are Lior and Avi. They still scratch their heads in wonder (neither has much hair) at the success of the Netflix show, which was number one all over the world, including in Lebanon and the UAE, with its fourth season that launched earlier this year.
“I don’t have an exact explanation for this phenomenon — no one can explain it,”admits Avi of the unexpected hit. “But I think it is a combination of a few elements. One is that half the show is in Arabic — so people in the Middle East feel pretty comfortable making the show. The second element is that both sides are very human, very interesting, even what might be considered the bad guys. And, also, I like to think the script was pretty good.”
The blockbuster final episode of the series four left everything open. But Lior and Avi insist that there will be a Fauda five — once they get time to think about what will be in it. In the meantime, they have a lot on their plates.
“We are just finishing a big show for [US channel Showtime, which is going to come out very soon. We have another big project with Netflix, we have two other projects with Apple — we have 15 projects in development,” says Lior. “We are doing a lot but we are hoping there will be a Fauda five very soon.”
The Showtime series is provisionally titled Beirut and is another spy drama — hopefully there will soon be news about where we
Brits can watch it — while another of their projects is about a real event set in America during the Second World War. There is also a heist film being planned for Netflix and the pair say they even have a romantic comedy in the works.
“The things that appeal to us are true stories and we only make shows we want to watch,” adds Lior. “It could be a comedy, it could be a thriller, but if we want to watch it, it is something we will want to make.”
While they are now big cheeses in Hollywood, the pair admit that not everyone there understands their Israeli ways.
“When we were last in LA we had a huge meeting with all our representatives; our lawyers, our agents, our managers and me and Avi had an argument about something to do with the content of one of the shows,” recalls Lior.
“We were arguing, we were shouting at each other in the middle of this Hollywood restaurant and our team looked at us — they were shocked — they had never seen anything like this.
I get a lot of messages from people in Iran on my Instagram, many with heart emojis
The night ended and Avi and I went to a bar to have some fun when we started getting calls from everyone asking, ‘Are you going to separate? What is going to a happen?’ We told them, ‘No, everything is fine!’ So, there are some cultural differences we have to get around.”
I also caught up via Zoom with the team behind another brilliant Israeli show, Tehran, which has been a huge hit on Apple TV and is a show I’ve becomes as obsessed by as Fauda. A third season is currently being filmed in Greece — which has proved such a realistic stand-in for Iran that it has even confused some Iranians — and our own Hugh Laurie has a part in it. I can reveal that he will be playing a nuclear scientist; it appears the stakes are ever higher for our accident-prone Mossad agent Tamar.
Niv Sultan, who plays Tamar, had to learn Farsi for the role, which came just four years after she left drama school. She’s in almost every scene of the action-packed series and the show’s creator and
producer Dana Eden said she was in awe of her stamina.
“Last week we were filming nights and it was very hard for Niv who ran headlong into it,” says Dana. “She was full of adrenaline that she didn’t notice she had hurt her ankle quite badly. She was running and jumping and doing Krav Maga and then she fainted.” Like Fauda, the show depicts Israelis and their enemies as almost morally equivalent and while Tehran has been a huge hit, the biggest surprise is just how popular it is in Iran.
“I get a lot of messages from people in Iran on my Instagram, many with heart emojis,” says Niv. “I think this is the biggest thing to happen out of the show.
“There are so many messages which say, ‘We don’t hate Israel, we can be friends. We are not enemies.’ When I read things like that I realise what we are doing here is much bigger than a television show or a part of my career. We are reaching out to another country and it’s amazing.” The crew in Greece includes many Iranians and Greeks, as well as Israelis and Americans with one former Iranian refugee becoming Glenn Close’s wardrobe mistress in the last series. The show constantly pulls you in with its jeopardy and Niv says the next series — which will hopefully be out by the end of the year — promises more of the same: “It is action-packed with lots of twists and turns in every episode,” she says. Meanwhile, there is much more Israeli content to look forward to. A new series of the psychological thriller Losing Alice is in the works, also for Apple TV Plus, while its production company Dori Media has an intriguing new show coming out in April called Hammam, a ghostly contemporary thriller based on the biblical story of Saul and David — I hope that we Brits get to see it soon. The same company has also created a Turkish version of Shtisel, which sounds utterly fascinating — with the Charedi Jews of the original now strict Muslims.
Israel’s enemies like to call hit shows such as Fauda and Tehran “Zionist propaganda” — but I would just say to them, this is what success looks like.