Ashkenazi is a leading man built on an old pattern, handsome and easy in a room, who does his best work when the ease is taken away from him. In Foxtrot he plays grief as housekeeping, and it is close to unbearable.
Fi1m perspective
The army has told Michael Feldmann that his son is dead, and a young officer has set an alarm on his phone so that he remembers to drink a glass of water every hour. In Foxtrot (2017) Lior Ashkenazi does what the alarm tells him. He feeds the dog. He puts his hand under a hot tap and leaves it there. Samuel Maoz keeps the camera on his face for most of that first chapter, and Ashkenazi gives it almost nothing to catch, which is the performance: a man who has decided to be practical because the alternative is unthinkable, and whose face is slowly losing the argument.
It took him some years to reach that register. He came out of Beit Zvi in 1994 and spent his first working life on the Israeli stage, with Habima, Beersheba and Beit Lessin, before Late Marriage (2001) made him a film lead as Zaza. Walk on Water (2004), a Mossad agent story, got him seen abroad. Footnote (2011) put him inside an academic family drama as Uriel Shkolnik, and Joseph Cedar has now directed him twice. He has the build and the manner of an old-fashioned leading man, and at home he has often been described as one. The films he picks keep removing the comfort that comes with it.
What he does with that is the interesting part. He is drawn, or gets drawn, to fathers and men in authority under pressure, the ones everyone else is meant to lean on, and he plays them from the outside in. The body is composed first, then the voice, and the trouble arrives late and in small ways: a hand that will not settle, a sentence finished a beat too soon. He has said of Foxtrot that he did not sleep for two days before the first day of shooting. "And it worked. It was like vertigo." We believe him. The moment we have not shaken is the scald, not the pain of it but the way Michael looks at his own hand afterwards, as if checking it is his.
The English-language work is more recent and we know it less well: Norman (2016) alongside Richard Gere, Golda (2023) as David Elazar, and television in Our Boys (2019), Valley of Tears (2020) and We Were the Lucky Ones (2024). He has done comedy, and in Big Bad Wolves (2013) he did horror. We cannot judge those at length. We can say that what he does in Foxtrot, refusing to perform grief until his body does it for him, needs a director willing to hold a shot on a man doing nothing, and Maoz was one. It would be good to see someone hand him a comedy in which nobody's son is in danger.
Biography
Lior Ashkenazi is an Israeli actor, voice actor, comedian and television presenter. Born on 28 December 1968 in Ramat Gan, he trained at the Beit Zvi School for the Performing Arts and began his career on the Israeli stage.
He gained prominence with his breakout role in Late Marriage (2001) and has since appeared in films including Walk on Water (2004), Footnote (2011), Foxtrot (2017) — for which he won an Ophir Award for Best Actor — and Golda (2023). Ashkenazi has received three Ophir Awards in total and has also worked in television series such as Valley of Tears (2020) and We Were the Lucky Ones (2024).
