A word springs to mind when watching Fauda. Not “chaos” which is its literal meaning but “macho”. Every episode of the phenomenally successful Israeli TV drama is jam-packed with action, guns, bombs, fights.
Men love it and so do women — and not just for the animal magnetism of stars Lior Raz and Doron Ben-David. The emotional potential of two communities, existing cheek by jowl yet utterly estranged from each other, is fully exploited. The Israelis and Palestinians are all portrayed with families and complex relationships and no one is totally bad or totally good.
Nonetheless there’s a substantial amount of testosterone in Fauda. So what’s it like to be a woman working on the show?
Rona-Lee Shimon plays Nurit, a woman who is dour and rarely smiles, someone with many issues. Nurit has developed from a behind-the-scenes member of staff to a fully-fledged field member, going undercover, even killing and becoming a key member of the team. She’s mainly seen in disguise or dressed down, or in fatigues, hair scraped back and no make-up.
So it was quite the contrast at a Fauda press junket in Jaffa in March, when a goddess-like creature came into the room. Tall, exquisitely dressed in a well-cut simple black dress with long flowing locks, she moved with the grace of a ballerina, a career she abandoned to become an actress. She was bright and gregarious with a warm welcoming smile; it took a moment to realise this was indeed Nurit, the actress Rona-Lee Shimon.
Rona Lee Shimon (Photo: Eden Yerushalmy)
She turns 40 in January but could pass for a decade younger, in part thanks to her impeccable style. She later reveals she has her own fashion company, marqe.com. “I loved dressing up when I was a kid. Watching what my mom and her friends wore. I wanted to look like them. You know the big earrings, jackets, the Dynasty look! Also, I think because of what I do, being so many characters and thinking about what they would wear, I’m just interested in clothes.”
When we meet again a couple of months later, this time on Zoom, she is the same; relaxed, simply elegant in a cool white vest but glamorous. Her accent has a slight American inflection.
I ask her about Nurit. What does she make of her? “I think from very beginning, my concept of her was of someone very practical. She’s all into her work. She believes in it and wants to be good at it. And you know there’s no room in that type of job to be dressed up or come with heels. She needs to be ready at every single moment for action. That’s what was important for me; to kind of speak that language through her clothing. So, leave the Louboutins at home!”
As a little girl growing up in Ramat Gan, she knew she wanted to perform, and dance was her métier. The eldest of four children, her parents sent her to ballet class when she was three years old. “I think at first it was just it was something for me to do. But I stuck with it. I think Mom realised both that I was talented and had somewhat of a connection to movement.”
“My mom was a gymnast when she was younger. Her body was very flexible, and she taught me that flexibility. She loved watching me dance. My father had a store for selling records for many years, so there was always music at home.”
Shimon was so talented she was granted a full scholarship to the Royal Ballet Academy in Amsterdam and at 18, left Israel on her own to study there for three years.
She had special permission to avoid joining the army, something of an irony considering her role in Fauda. “I know right?” she laughs. With no hands-on experience, she asked her brother to teach her how to shoot so she would be able to do it realistically in the show. “He was an officer in the army and he taught me. I didn’t want to come to set without the experience. I knew they’d all been in the army and there was no way I was going to be caught with my pants down!”
However, her ballet training stands her in good stead for the fight sequences. “With the timing and the camera angles, yes it’s very balletic.”
On her return to Israel, she joined a dance troupe and then took part in a TV show, Born to Dance. In 2006 she was cast in a musical soap opera, Our Song, was given a monologue and discovered a love of acting. “On the show I really fell in love with acting and after two seasons, I decided that I wanted to become a professional actress. But I didn’t want any shortcuts or ride the wave of being famous. I wanted to have the security of coming into a room and being able to stand in front of a director and give him what he wants with the confidence of experience. That was important to me and that’s why I went to acting school for three years.”
A director once said of the then-unknown Fred Astaire “can’t act, can’t sing, can dance a little”. Shimon can act, can dance and can sing. She’s played the lead in many musicals and during lockdown the legendary Hans Zimmer asked her to host and perform in an online gala to raise funds for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. “I sang When You Believe from The Prince of Egypt. I collaborated with an amazing group here, Boca Tiva, a youth organisation for people with difficult lives. It’s an a capella singing group. It was an incredible experience.”
She’s currently single but doesn’t rule out marriage and children. “I was never a person who was working on finding it. I have this core belief that when it’s going to happen it’s going to happen, it’s almost like magic! As for children, I think I woke up to the concept of having children later in my life comparing myself to other women. It’s certainly something I think about now!”
Rona-Lee Shimon as Nurit in Fauda (Photo Nora Aradi)
In 2015, when she went to the audition for the role of Nurit, Shimon had already worked out what made the character tick. “I think her essence is of someone who doesn’t feel like she belongs. She has the need to feel worthy enough, feel good enough. I think that’s what I wanted to bring to the table. How often we as human beings try to prove, mostly to ourselves that we are capable and worthy?”
Now, in series four, Nurit is not the only girl on the team. “I wanted more women on the show. I think it’s fantastic. The new girls are so talented. I’m glad there are more roles for women. I’m like the big sister!”
That’s nothing new for Shimon. As the eldest at home, she sometimes had to keep the others occupied. “I would dress them up and put on a show. Mom and her friends had to come watch, everybody had to come watch. I’ve been a director in my house you know, so my life kind of rolled in the right direction I’m happy to say.”
Liat Benasuly Amit, Fauda’s producer, has another production on her mind when we speak in mid-July, that of her second child. Aged 48, Benasuly Amit was then 26 weeks pregnant; “My next production, a little girl,” she tells me. Her first child, a boy is three and half, so by any standards she’s a late starter to motherhood.
“I was 41 when I met my husband Eli, who runs a cement plant,” she explains. “It was a combination of career and not the right person. Mostly my head just wasn’t in that place. I love children, I always said I wanted to be mother. I had boyfriends, relationships but none of them were really right.”
Officially she will take three and half weeks’ maternity leave when her daughter is born but, with a laugh, she says: “Last time after two weeks, I went to the Fauda set, obviously I had everything set up at home to support me. It was good because I wasn’t officially working but I still had things to do!”
When you meet Benasuly Amit, she is warm and engaging with ready sense of humour. She’s someone you think you’d love to have as a friend. She comes over as down to earth and approachable, and it’s hard to believe that she oversees one of Netflix’s most successful international shows with a producing history that includes Apple TV’s Suspicion, the hugely successful Homeland, False Flag, Messiah and many other Israeli and worldwide projects.
You can see when she talks that Fauda is her passion though; she loves the drama, the cast, the crew. “When we started with this, we didn’t know how far it would go,” she tells me. “But we can’t really let it go because we’ve still so many stories to tell. We are a family; we get closer and closer each season. We are ten years together now which is a long time. Off-screen we have deep friendships. Everyone is so dedicated to this. It is hard, it takes six days to shoot an episode and they are long days.
The crew has also been with us throughout. We meet all the time, we have dinner parties, we go out together. We love to be with each other and that comes over on screen.”
I pick up on “can’t really let it go” — does that mean, although we are all excited for the fourth series of Fauda, due any day now on Netflix, that there will be more? She laughs out loud. “For sure! There will be Fauda five!”
Liat Benasuly (Photo: Getty Images)
The long days shooting a series based around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict are not the only challenges she faces as a producer. Sometimes the show’s action sequences are mistaken for real. “We certainly have had people calling the police saying there is a shooting or a bombing. We plan everything scrupulously and the police, IDF, and villagers are all forewarned but still sometimes incidents occur!”
She goes on to tell me how one day they were filming something with a car in the road, near but off the set. The team had come back in shock because the police had swooped in and encircled them with guns.
“We were shooting a scene involving a car and guys with guns. Suddenly they were surrounded. Our guys were calling out to the police ‘We’re shooting Fauda, here is the camera!’ It was pretty scary for them. We don’t know how it happened.”
Unlike most TV dramas Fauda has a very real backdrop of existing conflict.
Benasuly Amit believes this adds a real dynamic to the show. “Reality is around the corner in Israel all the time of course. It gives Fauda a deeper intensity. Lior Raz keeps saying, ‘Something happens, and we’ve written it two years before!’ We have the series and real life, and they often are very similar. Sometimes I watch the news, and I think I’ve just read this scene. I think it’s another reason it’s so successful because it’s real.”
While lots of little girls dream of a life in TV or film, usually in front of the camera, Benasuly Amit says she always wanted to be a producer.
“I was 16 sitting watching TV with my dad in Netanya where I grew up and I loved Fame. It was like holy for me! We had one channel in Israel then. When the credits came, I always said to my dad ‘I want to be a TV producer!’ My dad always reminds me of it. He was very supportive and said, ‘Of course if that’s what you want to do then you will do it.’”
After studying international relationships and politics at university she admits she blagged her way into her first role as a production coordinator with a company. “I went to the interview and said ‘You’ll take me. You’ll be sorry if not.’ They took someone with experience but after two weeks they fired her and called me and that was it! I stayed there for seven years and ran the company after a while.”
From there she eventually formed her own company and became one the most in demand producers in the business. She could work 365 days a year if she wanted. “I could do much more, but I don’t want to because it would limit my involvement in each show, and I want to be hands-on. I want to be sure if it has my name on it, it must be right.”
She clearly loves to be in control but Benasuly Amit found a husband only when she let her friend take over. “She took my phone and downloaded a dating app! She wouldn’t take no for an answer and took my photo and wrote my profile. Within an hour I got messages and I went out with two guys who were really nice but not right. I was going to give up because I know with me if it doesn’t work straight away, I’m not interested. Two weeks later Eli contacted me. We found out that we were living five minutes away from each other. When I met Eli it was like: ‘Oh yes, this is how it’s supposed to be!’”
Combining motherhood and producing an international TV series for a woman in her forties is not without its challenges. “I know physically it is a bit more difficult but mentally it’s more right for me. I’m not a 20-year-old who doesn’t know what to do. I have enough environmental support. I have babysitters and I have the means to look after a child”
So, no regrets? “I’m not regretting, not at all, especially now having the second child and I hope everything will be OK. I feel like I’ve done it in my own way. I’ve lived my best life.”
Lucy Ayoub knows more than most about religious conflict. Her own background would make an epic TV drama Her father is a Christian Arab and her mother, born Ashkenazi Jewish, converted to Christianity. Her paternal grandmother was the daughter of Palestinian refugees who fled to Lebanon during the 1948 Arab Israeli War, leaving her in a convent in Israel. She was later was adopted by an Arab-Christian woman named Lucy Khayat, after whom Ayoub is named.
Her maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors: her maternal grandfather had been in a Nazi concentration camp, while her maternal grandmother from Romania survived among partisans as a child.
Lucy Ayoub (Photo: Shai Franco)
Ayoub first rose to fame in Israel through her poetry. In one of her pieces, she says: “For some of you I’ll always be the Arab’s daughter while for others I’ll be ‘bint al-Yahudiya’ (daughter of the Jewish woman), don’t tell me I can’t be both.”
“I was always both,” Ayoub tells me when we meet. “My identity has roots in many cultures and many places. I’m proud of what I am and of my background. The way my parents raised me was to see the human side of every person and every situation.”
Ayoub’s husband of a year, Etay Bar, is Jewish, to add to the mix. “People around the world are not aware that there are Christian Arabs in Israel! I spend half of my time celebrating because I celebrate both Christian and Jewish festivals. It’s always been this way. It saves a lot of conflicts with my parents and in-laws. On the Jewish festivals we go to his and on the others to my parents. Also, I served in the army too because I was born Jewish.”
Ayoub is known in Israel mainly for presenting, having hosted her own radio show, the Eurovision Song Contest, The Chase and since last year Dancing With The Stars, Israel’s version of Strictly.
She’s played a few comedy roles in the past but as Maya Binyamin in Fauda, this is Ayoub’s first foray into serious drama.
“Maya’s a daughter of a Palestinian family” she explains. “Her father helped the Israelis but was exposed and they had to take him from Palestine to Israel. She grew up in Israel, became a mainstream Israeli, married to a Jewish guy, lives in a kibbutz, and she’s a police officer. But her brother never saw his future in Israel and couldn’t accept his identity there. So, at some point he goes to Lebanon, and this is the starting point of Fauda four, he become engaged in terrorism.”
Ayoub is exceptionally pretty and looks much younger than her 30 years. She grew up in Haifa and one of her first performances as a child was singing in the choir in the Catholic church. “Ever since I was a child, I really loved the stage. I loved to sing. I was always looking for somewhere to sing and perform. Always in the school plays and shows. I always loved writing too and think there’s a great connection between writing and performing.”
Her life changed after entering a poetry slam in Israel and performing there, radio and TV work followed.
Lucy Ayoub (Photo: Shai Franco)
She would love to write either a book or play and I suggest her own back story would make a great work of fiction. “That’s the big dream. I think my story could be a totally epic drama, it’s a big story, not just for a TV show.”
Of her diverse background she says, “I think I feel some sort of responsibility about it. I live my life and do what I love, and I just got married to man of my dreams. So, I don’t think of it every day. But this background made me and my siblings have more of an empathy with people and Palestinians. It taught us to think in a more complex way.”
As well as being perfectly placed to be the new woman of Fauda.
Fauda Series 1-3 is streaming now on Netflix, Fauda 4 is coming soon
