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Funny girl
By Rita Kupfer
Tags: Polishuk, Israel News 

Poking out like a jack-in-the-box from behind Sasson Gabai, a.k.a. Minister Polishuk, is Shiri Gadni in the role of Tkuma the media adviser - a staffer so loyal she sees herself and the minister as a single entity. "We're a minister!" she exclaimed on hearing about his surprise appointment at the start of the series. Polishuk probably could have used a somewhat more experienced media adviser, someone a little pushier and more ambitious (who doesn't just pat herself on the back when she recognizes a successful bit of spin, but could actually come up with some herself). But in Shmuel Hasfari's political comedy series, despite the inexperience and shortcomings of the minister and his aide, Polishuk still manages to escape nearly every imbroglio that comes his way - and come out on top.

For Gadni, this television role in a prime-time Channel 2 show that benefits from being broadcast directly after Keshet's highly popular "Kochav Nolad" (the Israeli version of "American Idol"), means major exposure and a career breakthrough. The 30-year-old actress has been performing at the Gesher Theater and the Cameri Theater for years. Currently, she is appearing in "Haya o lo haya," a play about Hanna Rovina and Alexander Penn. She plays a journalist hoping to score an interview with the poet to help her advance from the kibbutz newspaper to Davar. The play has been running almost nightly for two years.

She was also seen on the big screen last year in Moshe Mizrahi's film "Weekend in Galilee." Children know her from the Israeli drama series "Alex For and Against," in which she played a teacher whose personality is not all that different from Tkuma's. Gadni will soon continue that role for a second season. Older kids may recognize her from the show "Zbeng!" The grown-up audience may have noticed her in comic roles on Lior Shlein's late-night talk show on Channel 10 (where she's appeared as Pinocchio, Catwoman, a soldier and a pilot, among other things). But Tkuma is the role that has really shot her into public consciousness.
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The comparison to those shows is not completely without merit. "Polishuk" is like an old-fashioned TV comedy: The subject matter may be Israeli, but it has a universal satiric flavor, while unique in its focus. The scripts are very carefully constructed, sometimes to the point of predictability, but there are great moments, too. "Polishuk" has theatrical foundations.

"Each episode is like a play," says the series creator, playwright and screenwriter Hasfari. "Six-and-a-half hours of drama (the equivalent of 13 episodes of the series) is like four plays for the theater," he calculates.

Hasfari first saw Gadni at the Acre festival eight years ago, in the play "Return of the Killer Socks."

"I saw someone with an incredible range, doing whatever she felt like doing," he says. "At the time, I wanted her to act in a play I'd written for the Cameri, but her whole Nissan Nativ class ended up going to the Gesher Theater. A few more years passed and then, when I was gathering material for this show, I spoke with a real media adviser to several ministers, who really reminded me of her. And I knew that I wanted Shiri.

"This role was written for her down to the fillings in her teeth. And on the very first reading it was clear she was absolutely perfect for it," Hasfari continues. "She has a musicality and intelligence. She is able to convey every meaning, she plays the strings just right, she's the perfect synthesizer. I know I sound like an infatuated director."

No political animal

For Gadni, being approached by Hasfari was a dream come true. "I'd finished studying at Nissan Nativ, I'd put on 'Return of the Killer Socks' with Yishai Karni and Ram Appelberg, who directed and produced. We took first place [at the Acre festival]. Hasfari talked to me then, and some time after that he contacted me about a play, but we hadn't been in touch since then," she relates. "Actors go through periods when they're working a lot and periods when they're not working at all, and I was in one of those periods of no work, and that's just when he called and told me that he was writing a part for me. It didn't really register at first. A part? Just for me? I admit I was thrilled."

Like the character that was tailored for her, Gadni is not a political animal. "I'm not involved, I'm not politically active. Political debates always leave me feeling out of it. It's very hard for me to relate to what's going on. I don't know who's the minister of this and who's the minister of that, and I don't have any grasp of political terminology. During filming, I was always saying, 'Okay, whatever you say.' I'm the opposite of Amnon Dankner," she says. Dankner plays Humi Schalit, head of the Malal party to which Polishuk belongs (and it's no coincidence that the character's name is similar to that of Tommy Lapid, Dankner's friend who headed another centrist party).

Originally, Menashe Noy was supposed to play Polishuk. "Noy was the first choice," Hasfari said a year and a half ago. "When I was writing the series, I had him in mind. We waited a few months for him, and two days before filming was due to start his agency informed us he wouldn't be able to participate. We delayed the filming and started looking for someone else." And then they found Sasson Gabai.

"It's hard to point to the precise differences between the two. Menashe was the more obvious choice. I felt a chemistry with him, but I feel that with Sasson, too. It was a smooth transition for me, but it was a saga for the production. As Sasson himself said, he came into the part the way Polishuk came into the job of minister." As a quick but permanent substitute, in other words.

Gadni is fond of her own character, and pities her a little, too. "Tkuma is possessive about her men. And they usually dump her. She's jealous when it comes to the minister, especially when another woman shows up. She's married to her job and brings her friends there. She's bulimic, a former settler who was ostracized by that society because she couldn't keep her hands off men."

Celebs from Netanya

Shiri Gadni was born in Netanya. When she was 15, her parents moved to Rishon Letzion but, not wanting to leave her friends, Gadni remained in Netanya for another year and lived with her grandparents. She was involved in drama clubs from third grade on, "even though I was a very shy kid," she says. "When they asked who wanted to try out for the drama club and I raised my hand, the teacher said, 'You?!' Despite the surprise in her voice, I was the only one who made it," she says triumphantly.

"In Netanya there are basically two main drama schools for kids," she says. "Habustan and Rivka Almog. I think most of the celebs were at Habustan, but I was at Rivka Almog." When asked to name the celebs from Netanya, she cites the actor Mariano Edelman and then stops short. She doesn't have a detailed list.

"Polishuk is from Netanya," she notes. "When I finally moved to Rishon, my mother, who I'm very close to, suggested that I apply to the theater track at Ironi Aleph high school in Tel Aviv, and I was accepted. I got up early every morning to make it to Tel Aviv to start school at 7:30."

All that commuting paid off. The play that she and her classmates put on in 12th grade was accepted for the Acre festival and subsequently made it to Habima. Her theater group from school opened the Bimartef (it was called Hanagariya at the time).

Whether or not her father's death had something to do with it, in those years she became a "punk youth," as she describes it. "I was a real follower, and it was fashionable then to go around with torn shirts and black eye makeup. Today it makes me laugh." Besides, she adds, "I was still a good girl, and I'm a good girl now, too. I've been living on my own for many years, and supporting myself."

On her mailbox it says "Alon and Shiri Gadni" - a ploy to keep predators away: Her boyfriend is a cameraman studying at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

"We fly to visit each other, though I do less traveling because I'm on stage in the theater almost every night. We keep up our relationship on Skype," she explains. "Until I came to the Nissan Nativ studio, I hadn't really grappled with my father's death. "But I had this ache deep in my heart. Up to then I was all happy-go-lucky, I loved everyone and felt like everyone loved me. No darkness, no depression. In the class there I met another five students who had lost parents at an early age. This was the first time I'd been in that situation. There, everything came to the surface. And I dared to go into it, to find the darkness, and I wasn't afraid of being ugly on stage."

Actors who do this very successfully, in her view, are Tiki Dayan and Sasson Gabai. "I like actors who change from one role to the next, like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Sean Penn, Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep. They have intelligence and they're not threatening. At the studio, I discovered drama. I discovered that I could play a character role. When I came to the studio, I thought I was just a comic actress. The tendency for actors is to always do the things that are comfortable, which for me is comedy. The school encouraged us to take chances."

'I'm growing up'

She fills her routine with a lot of exercise classes, with Pilates and yoga: All for the sake of "improving the instrument," an expression that actors and singers use when talking about themselves. A friend is also teaching her French. She loves to dance and go out to clubs. "I think that trance music really helps you de-stress. My psychologist recommends walking." Psychotherapy is also part of the routine.

"I'm growing up very slowly. It's hard for me to disconnect from childhood and make that transition to being a woman," she says. "It's very hard in the framework of the theater to bring a pregnancy and a baby into this lifestyle. I have so much to see and to experience and bring myself to the point where I'd have the confidence to pass something on to a child. But it's starting to happen. I'm looking at babies differently lately."

Asked if she is a late bloomer in other ways, she says: "Well, I only did a film for the first time last year - 'Weekend in Galilee.' I don't think I could have done cinema before that." The movie, based on Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," came and went without leaving a trace. She thinks it's because it was a very un-Tel Aviv kind of film. "This was a movie you needed to come to without a drop of cynicism. It wasn't some relationship saga set on Rothschild Boulevard."

She readily admits, however, that she was quite fond of the "Lost and Found" series about just that. She would like to do more movies, and she is currently working on a film by Shalom Hagar called "Shrouds" in which she plays a pregnant, ultra-Orthodox woman.
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