Lior Raz and the problem of being mistaken for Doron Kavillio

Lior Raz

Photo: Ofer Hajayov / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 24, 1971 Jerusalem, Israel
Occupation	Actor and screenwriter
Known for	Gladiator II, 6 Underground, Tuner
Awards	2 Academy Award

When Lior Raz knocked on the door of a family he had come to evacuate, the people inside looked at him and asked, “Doron?” He told them his name was Lior and that they had to leave now. The exchange sums up his career in two lines. Raz co-created Fauda out of the work he did as a young soldier, cast himself as its commander, and built a character so close to his own biography that audiences have stopped separating the two. What his work keeps testing is whether the man who wrote Doron Kavillio can still write his way out of him.

The Arabic came first. Raz’s parents are Mizrahi Jews who came to Israel from Iraq and Algeria, and he grew up in Ma’ale Adumim, just outside Jerusalem. His father, a veteran of the navy’s commando flotilla and of the Shin Bet, later ran a plant nursery. He spoke Arabic at home with his father and grandmother, and with the Palestinian workers at the nursery who played with him as a boy. Years later, that fluency would become the premise of a television series.

Raz, born in Jerusalem on November 24, 1971, enlisted at 18 and became a commando in Duvdevan, the undercover counter-terrorism unit whose soldiers operate disguised as Arabs, and he stayed in its reserves for two decades. When he was 19, his girlfriend of three years, Iris Azulai, was murdered in a stabbing attack in Jerusalem in 1990. Her killer was freed in the 2011 prisoner exchange for Gilad Shalit. Raz has kept her name inside his work: he dedicated an episode of Fauda to her, and the hero of his Netflix series Hit & Run carries her surname.

The road to acting ran through Los Angeles. In 1993 a security company hired him as a bodyguard for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Back in Israel at 24, he trained at the Nissan Nativ acting studio in Tel Aviv and spent roughly a decade at the edges of Israeli screens, in parts such as a police commander in Nadav Lapid’s Policeman.

The turn came with a script he wrote with Avi Issacharoff, a Haaretz journalist. Fauda, the Arabic word for chaos, follows an undercover unit working in the West Bank. It premiered on the Israeli satellite channel Yes in 2015, and Netflix took it worldwide in December 2016. The New York Times named it the best international show of 2017. The Israeli Television Academy gave it six awards in 2016, best drama among them, and eleven in 2018, including best actor for Raz.

Abroad, the show got him cast mostly as men with authority. He played the Mossad chief Isser Harel in Operation Finale and the dictator Rovach Alimov in Michael Bay‘s 6 Underground. In Apple TV+‘s The Crowded Room he was Yitzhak, the landlord who turns protector to Tom Holland‘s character. For Gladiator II, Ridley Scott, a Fauda fan, offered him Viggo, a gladiator trainer, without an audition, then worried the part was too small. Raz said he would happily just cross a frame.

His own projects have had a rougher ride. Hit & Run, co-created with Issacharoff, Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin, reached Netflix in August 2021 with Raz as Segev Azulai, a tour guide chasing the truth about his wife’s death. Netflix cancelled it the following month. Faraway Road Productions, the company he founded with Issacharoff, was bought by Candle Media in 2022 and made Ghosts of Beirut, a Showtime miniseries about the long hunt for Imad Mughniyeh. On screen he found a different register in A Body That Works, a Keshet 12 drama about surrogacy that became Israel’s highest-rated drama of 2023 before Netflix took it abroad.

The criticism of Fauda has never gone away, and it arrives from both sides. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign called it racist, anti-Arab propaganda that glorifies the army; some Israeli critics, from the other side, found it unflattering to Israelis. Raz’s reply has stayed the same: he says he never set out to make propaganda, and that right-wing Israelis told him the show was the first time they had seen Palestinians on screen as human beings. The tension sits in the premise. A series told from inside an undercover unit can give its Palestinian characters grief and depth and still ask the audience to ride along with the people hunting them. Its best seasons are the ones that leave that discomfort in place.

The attack of October 7, 2023 erased what distance remained between the show and his life. Raz was in Romania preparing a presentation when his sister called from Kibbutz Erez, where she was trapped as attackers closed in. He flew home that night and, with Issacharoff and Yohanan Plesner, drove to Sderot to evacuate families under rocket fire. On that trip a stranger opened the door and called him Doron. The war reached the production too: crew member Matan Meir was killed fighting in Gaza, and castmate Idan Amedi was wounded as a reservist.

The fifth season is what came out of that. The scripts written before the attack were thrown out and the season rebuilt, with Omri Givon directing. It is set two years after October 7 and follows Doron’s team to Marseille, although security concerns moved the shoot to Budapest. Mélanie Laurent joins the cast; the two episodes depicting the attack carry viewer warnings. It premiered on Yes on May 18 and reached Netflix worldwide on September 8. Raz describes it as a season that begins with revenge and ends somewhere else, and hopes viewers leave understanding why peace matters.

Away from Doron, his recent work has been unusually varied. He starred in Erez Tadmor’s Soda, drawn from the life of Tadmor’s grandfather, a Jewish partisan. In Off Road, a six-part unscripted Netflix series released in July 2025, he and his close friend Rotem Sela drove through Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan with a therapist along for the trip. And in Daniel Roher’s heist film Tuner, which opened in American cinemas in May, he plays Uri, who runs a security firm that robs its own clients and recruits Leo Woodall‘s piano tuner as its safecracker.

Raz is married to the actress Meital Berdah. They have four children and live in Ramat Hasharon.

The next script again puts a real rescue ahead of a fictional mission. In 2024 Leviathan Productions hired Raz and Issacharoff to write October 7th, a feature about Noam Tibon, the retired general who drove south to pull his son’s family out of Kibbutz Nahal Oz; no release date has been announced. Nearer at hand, on November 15, Raz is due in Chicago to talk about the season that brought Doron back.

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Tags: actors, Ridley Scott, Gladiator II, Tuner, Fauda, Lior Raz

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