Lior Raz! Even his name sounds rugged. There he is, in my kitchen; the star and co-creator of the hit Netflix series, Fauda. Even on Zoom he oozes testosterone. He’s just come from rehearsals for series four of Fauda. Unshaven, in a plain black T shirt, in a day of pretty boy film stars, Raz is unforgivingly masculine. A deep scar on his forehead, thanks to a car crash when he was younger, gives him an almost roguish air. He’s passionate and articulate. When he smiles – say when he’s talking about his wife and children — he’s almost like a little boy, a tad cheeky. It’s easy to see why he’s also achieved heartthrob status. But mention this and he laughs, loudly.
“If I am a sex symbol, every man on earth can be! I’m just an ordinary, bald, 50-year-old rough guy!”
Raz in action (Photo: Elia Spinopolos)
He’s match-fit now, but admits he put on 15lb during lockdown. He blames baking. “I gave up smoking,” he says. “I baked everything. Cinnamon buns, cakes, amazing bread. I fell in love with dough and made love with it every day.” Oo-er.
But he’s back in front of the camera. Filming schedules for the fourth season of Fauda have had to be rejigged at the last minute, because Ukraine was due to be a location.
Instead, the team is heading for Budapest for two weeks at the end of March.
Raz won’t reveal anything else about the fourth season, other than to say it’s set in many locations, including for the first time in Europe.
He adds, with that same disarming smile: “I could tell you more, but then I would have to kill you.”
When Fauda, which means “chaos” in Arabic, first aired in Israel in 2015, Raz and his co-writer, Avi Issacharoff, thought no one would watch an Israel Defence Force (IDF) drama that looks at the conflict from both sides, with half the dialogue in Arabic. Raz also plays the lead character Doron Kavillio, a maverick member of an undercover counter-terror unit in the IDF.
“We started with a dream that you think nobody will follow,” he says. “It’s yours and of course my partner Avi’s. We had this dream. We didn’t know that this is going to be such a huge success. Nobody wanted it, you know? So we are running from broadcaster to broadcaster, just to try and secure a commission. When it was taken up by Yes Studios, we still thought only our parents would watch it.”
Not only did people watch Fauda, but it also quickly became the most-watched drama in Israel, winning 17 Israeli Academy Awards. Netflix took up the show in 2016 and it became a worldwide hit. When the trailer landed for the long-awaited season four — coming later this year — it immediately chalked up nearly 200,000 YouTube views.
Lior Raz ( Doron ) Lucy Ayoub ( Maya )(Photo: Elia Spinopolos)
The most surprising thing is that the show resonated across the Arab world.
“It was number one in Lebanon, number two in UAE, popular all over the Arab world. I cannot walk around in the UAE, I am mobbed,” he laughs. “It’s crazy what’s going on there. Countries who feared Israelis, from Yemen, Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, their people are sitting with me, talking with me on how we changed their perspective of Israelis.”
Raz, whose father was from Iraq and mother from Algeria, is proud of the way his work has broken down boundaries.
“I thought art didn’t change people,” he says. “I truly believed that nobody would change because of art. But now I can see that Fauda has this power on people. Look, we didn’t set out to make a propaganda show and still it is mainly a drama. There was an article in the main Egyptian newspaper which said it was the first time they had seen a proper Israeli person. Not the propaganda that they had seen for many years of how bad we are, how ugly we are, how cruel we are. So now they see an Israeli can be a good guy who just sometimes does horrible things. Also, the right wingers in Israel, they say this is the first time they’ve seen Palestinians as human and sympathetic.”
Growing up in the West Bank town of Ma’ale Adumim, near Jerusalem, he and his family spoke Arabic at home. His father, who served in the Shin Bet, went on to open a plant nursery while his mother was a secretary for a law firm. “A lot of the people who worked at my father’s nursery were Arabs and I would help out there after school, so I got very used to speaking Arabic,” he recalls.
Unable to concentrate at school, he played the clown instead. He later discovered that he suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “I thought I was lazy,” he says. “I tried really hard to be a good student, really hard. But I thought I’m stupid or lazy. I thought I had no potential, as my teachers said.”
As he got older and was diagnosed, he learned to see the positives. “It’s a blessing, in a way, if you can control it,” he says. “You can allow your mind to wander and to create. It’s like being on a surfboard and not knowing where or how high it’ll take you.”
After completing his army service, he went to the United States and became a bodyguard for Arnold Schwarzenegger. “I was at his home, outside guarding,” he recalls. “Not such a big deal. It wasn’t like the movie Bodyguard.” I sense it wasn’t the greatest time in his life. “I was in shock from my army service. I went to the US two or three days after I was released from the army. I didn’t see Hollywood as a place I wanted to live. I think it’s a hard place to live if you are not successful.”
Inbar Lavi ( Shani ) Doron Ben David ( Steve) filming series 4 of Fauda (Photo: Elia Spinopolos)
On returning to Israel, he studied drama at Nissim Nativ in Tel Aviv, eventually forming his own production company.
“I have a big ego,” he confesses. “I needed to be successful in something. I want to stand out. I wasn’t good at school, I had to find ways or something to be good at. So, acting. And I played the drums, I had a band. I was trying to find a place for myself, something to be good at.”
He’s the eldest of four, with three younger sisters.
“I was spoilt, most definitely,” he says, with that diffident smile. He’s seemingly destined to be surrounded by girls; he now has three daughters of his own – Maya, 12 Nina, nine and one-year-old Uval — and one son, Guy, six.
Ask him what sort of father he is and all traces of machismo disappear. “With my girls I am very soft,” he says. “I give in to them all the time. Whatever they want or need, they have it. I’m very present when I am there.
“With my Guy, my baby boy, not a baby really, he’s seven, we do boy things. Motorcycles, hiking, camping, driving 4x4s.”
He and his wife Meital Berdeh have been married for nearly 14 years. “We met in a bar,” he laughs. “A cliché, right? I thought she was the most beautiful person I had ever seen.”
Her support, he adds, was a huge contributory factor to his current success.
“You know the story of Jacob’s ladder?” he asks. “So, if I’m taking this story, I’m now climbing on the ladder, and my wife, she’s holding the ladder. That’s how I feel. My wife she is the hero, actually. She needs to take care of five children at home, our children and me.”
Raz’s calm disposition is hard won. After his childhood problems, he suffered a deep personal trauma.
In 1990, 19-year-old Raz – who had joined Duvdevan, an elite Israeli counterterrorism unit, just a year before — received the news that his then-girlfriend, Iris Azulai, had been stabbed by a terrorist.
She died a few hours later, aged just 18. They had been together for three years.
He grieved for a long time. “It was the hardest thing that ever happened to me,” he says.
Creating and acting in Fauda has gone a long way to bring him peace.“I wouldn’t choose the word cathartic, but it was a healing process,” he says.
“You are dealing with things you’ve never dealt with. I didn’t talk about my army service for years. I didn’t talk about Iris either. When we were writing and shooting Fauda, I realised I was dealing with things I’d blocked out.”
His co-writer, Avi Issacharoff, was a great help.
“Avi had a great memory about things I’d done in the army, operations I’d forgotten about,” Raz recalls. “He caused me to remember. Through that… well, as an actor you have this blessing where you can take yourself into a place where nobody can take you. It’s about soul, about pain, about fighting about overcoming. With Doron, everything is too extreme. So, in a way, you are living through something in a very extreme way.”
He admits there have been many times he’s cried on set.
“It has opened many wounds. For me it was through the acting, not necessarily through the writing or creating. For example, last season I was talking to a character in his grave. I started to cry and couldn’t stop for about half an hour. The crew just left me; I couldn’t stop because everything was coming out.”
Fauda has brought Raz many things, including financial security. Not long after we speak, he and Issacharoff sold their company Faraway Road Productions to Candle Media, a Disney subsidiary for $50,000,000.
It’s also brought him international fame. When another series he wrote and starred in for Netflix, Hit & Run, aired last year, his face was on a 100ft billboard in New York’s Times Square.
“Sometimes it’s not easy. How do you say it? A double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s amazing because people just love you, you know. Sometimes, it’s too much. It strangles. I was flying from London to Israel, sitting in business class, very alone, when suddenly about three or four people came into my booth, just to hug me. Well, that sort of crosses the line.”
Not wanting to appear ungrateful, he adds: “I remember when I was young, there was a football player who was very famous in Israel, Uri Malmilian. I saw him somewhere. I was so excited that I was standing next to him, and he hugged me. It meant the world to me. If I can be like this person to someone, then I’m blessed.”
Fauda is streaming now on Netflix. Series Four airs later this year
