Jeff Wilbusch

Moische Lefkovitch arrives in Unorthodox as Yakov's worldlier cousin, and the series sends him after the wife who has run. Jeff Wilbusch plays him listening. He leans in a little, says less than he plainly knows, and lets us see that he enjoys knowing it. In a drama built around Shira Haas's Esty, who cannot hide a thing, he is the one person hiding everything, and the series is sharper whenever he is on screen.

That is the compliment and, in that series, the problem. Maria Schrader's four episodes are at their best in the flat, in the marriage, and Moische's strand pulls them towards a thriller they were not built to be. We will own the feeling: we resented every cut to him, because the story was better where he was not, and we were sorry each time he left the frame. He is coiled and sly and he is doing more than the material needs. An actor who makes you wish the programme were about him is doing his job; it is the programme that has miscounted.

The Yiddish is his own. Wilbusch was raised in a Hasidic Satmar community in Jerusalem, moved to the Netherlands at thirteen, took a degree in economics in Amsterdam and only then trained as an actor in Munich, at the Otto Falckenberg School, before working at the Kammerspiele. He has said that as a child he did not know a person could become an actor, or that acting schools existed. The screen work began in German television and in supporting parts in large casts: Anton Mesterbein in Park Chan-wook's The Little Drummer Girl (2018), a role in Bad Banks. Unorthodox (2020) was the part that got him noticed, and the parts have grown since: Uri Savir in Oslo (2021), then Detective Avraham Avraham in The Calling (2022), his first English-language lead, in a series created by David E. Kelley. A horror series, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, is due in 2026.

We have not seen enough of the later work to judge it, and we will not pretend to. What we can see is the shape of the casting. Moische knows the religious world from inside and moves through the secular one with ease; Avraham, in The Calling, is a detective who brings his faith to the job. That is a type, Wilbusch is unusually well equipped for it, and it is a small one. The question for the next few years is whether anyone will write him a part with no Yiddish in it and no God, so we can find out how much of the coil is his and how much belongs to the casting.

Watch Unorthodox for Haas, as most people will, and then notice who you keep looking for when she is off screen.