Nobody’s Nobody

Meital Dohan is such a big star in Israel, if she so much as spits in Tel-Aviv, it lands in the _Yedioth Ahronoth_ gossip column. The award-winning actress has become a household name from her TV roles in _Elvis_ and the Israeli _Ugly Betty_, as well as starring turns in the films _Disphoria_ and _God’s Sandbox_, which was recently released in the U.S. on DVD. She’s still relatively unknown here in the States, but not for long.

Dohan just finished a run as Yael Hoffman in the second season of _Weeds_, Showtime’s hilarious series about a suburban single mom who sells pot to keep the family afloat. Dohan plays a dangerously coy taskmistress at the head of a rabbinical school. “I was reading the script,” says Dohan, “and saw the line, ‘I’m wearing a bra, so stop looking for my nipples.’ That was the green light, I knew this was a part for me.” Andy Botwin (played by Justin Kirk), a full-grown man, begs her to let him join the yeshiva, even though admission is restricted to young boys. His reason, strangely, is to avoid some non-existent draft, but hey, everyone on the show is stoned, including the writers. Dohan’s Yael orders the rabbi-wannabe to write what he knows about Judaism. He says, “So far I’ve written that being a Jew means I have no foreskin and I may be a Tay-Sachs carrier.” She proceeds to entice and verbally whip him until his head spins, because under the prim schoolmistress demeanor lies a brilliant dominatrix who quickly assesses which verse in the Talmud applies to Andy: the one where he takes a black dildo up the ass. Hallelujah, he’s a changed man. So changed, in fact, that he doesn’t need her anymore and quits the yeshiva.

“I started giggling,” Dohan says about how it felt performing such a scene. “In Israel, I have a provocative image, and now here I’m in my first role in America and I’m fucking a guy with a dildo. Not bad. Maybe the image chooses you.”

Dohan also just wrapped a new film, _L.L._, written and directed by Amos Kollek, (_Fast Food Fast Women_). But the road to international success hasn’t been easy. Dohan describes arriving in New York: “I’m well-known in Israel, but people wanted me to start over here as a nobody. It’s shocking to build your life, and then be told you have to rebuild it all over. Casting agents just said, ‘Give me your resume! Make head shots! Lose the Jew!’ But I’m not good at being nobody.”

Although Dohan has now made New York City her home, she admits, “I really never left Israel. I need both. Israel is like my wife and New York is my lover.” She laughs. “Sometimes I really miss guys falling in love with me because they know they’d be able to say they had a date with Meital Dohan.”

What do you think?