Amit Rahav

Watch Yakov Shapiro in the bedroom scenes of Unorthodox (2020). His wife cannot do what the marriage requires, everyone in the family knows it, and he stands about in his own home looking as though he would like to be told what to do next. Amit Rahav does not play him as a brute. He plays a frightened boy who wants to do right and has been handed a precise list of what right is, and the scenes hurt because he and Shira Haas are both trying so hard to be good at something neither of them understands. We came in ready to dislike the husband and found we could not, and that is Rahav's doing; it is the best decision the programme makes.

He had done a fair amount before anyone outside Israel noticed. There was stage work, the television series Mishpacha Sholetet (2014–2016), an early film part in The Damned (2018). Unorthodox, directed by Maria Schrader, was the turn. By his own account he nearly did not go for it: "I was told that there was a role coming up for a religious role and I would have to speak Yiddish. I thought it was a bit too far-fetched. I had never spoken Yiddish or played a religious role and I didn’t want to give a bad audition, so I said I would not go for the part. A week later, they called me again." He went, learned the Yiddish, and the part became the one he is known for.

What has followed leans on the same ground. Transatlantic (2023) puts him in the Holocaust era as Thomas Lovegrove; We Were the Lucky Ones (2024) does so again as Jakob Kurc. We have not reviewed either, so we will not judge them here, but the pattern is plain enough: more period dress, more history on the shoulders. At home he does something else. Matchmaking (2022) is a popular Haredi comedy in which he plays Moti, which suggests Israeli audiences see a lighter actor than the one that has been exported.

The thing to hold on to from Unorthodox is not the costume or the accent but the stillness. Rahav can stand in a scene and let another actor's cruelty land on him without flinching or answering back, and when Delia Mayer's Miriam Shapiro discusses his wife as if she were a kitchen appliance that has stopped working, it is his face we watch, not hers. That is a rarer gift than dialect. It will keep him in period drama for as long as he lets it. Whether anyone writes him a man who is not frightened, and whether he is as good when he is not, is the question the next few years should answer.