When you meet Hakim Djaziri for the first time, it's his big smile and his laughing eyes that catch your attention. He is in the middle of a photo shoot on the beautiful Place Edouard-VII, in Paris, and takes this new role of rising star seriously, without really taking himself seriously. At 45, the actor, theater man, playwright, but also a high-level table tennis player, has already made his mark, and knows the sometimes ephemeral nature of success. Today, however, he does not shy away from his pleasure to promote a series of which he was a fan from the start, long before becoming one of the main protagonists. Season 5 of Fauda is broadcast from September 8 on Netflix.
How did this happen? “The casting didn't take long,” he explains, “and when I was told it was me, I was filled with pride, because first of all it's an extremely successful series, whether in terms of the script, the rhythm, the music or the actors…” Pride, mixed however with apprehension, because Fauda is not just any series. For more than ten years, she has been telling the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by following the operations of an elite unit of the Israeli army. A hot topic, which has become completely controversial in Europe after October 7 and the war in Gaza which has been taking place since.
So when he announced to his loved ones his participation in the filming, moreover as one of the main actors of the season, the reactions were sometimes virulent. If he knew that he was going, as he said, "to embark on something which would perhaps cause him harm", he did not imagine the verbal violence of which he was going to be the target, of "absolute brutality": "There were people who told me that they did not understand how I could collaborate in a series of propaganda. They put me in a box: I had chosen my side."
And yet, everything in Hakim Djaziri's career proves the opposite. Because he, today an apostle of nuance and the art that unites, could have gone very wrong: he is acutely aware of this when he tells his story, with a very fluid flow of words, those which show the distance taken, and the path accomplished towards serenity.
An Algerian family who fled the “black decade”
Born in Algeria in the early 1980s, he remembers the happy years of his childhood, in a large house, an extended family surrounding him, uncles, aunts, cousins, with whom he grew up in Algiers, and loving parents – father a senior civil servant, mother psychologist. Everything changed at the turn of the 1990s: the interruption of the democratic process to prevent the Islamists from coming to power caused a civil war, which left more than 150,000 dead in ten years.
Hakim's family is one of the targets, and at the alarm too many, his parents decide to move to Paris in a hurry: "I was 13 years old, and for me, it was just a vacation. I never imagined that it was permanent. I was the only one to wear a big smile at the airport when leaving."
France, for the teenager, is the "Club Dorothée" that he sees on TV, Nutella and the Big Mac, these marker products of the West that made him salivate. For his parents, the shock is severe. They who thought that France resembled the streets of the capital everywhere found themselves urgently housed in the city of 3,000 in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a “ghetto zone, which concentrated an incalculable number of social problems”, remembers Hakim Djaziri.
“I adopted violence as a mode of communication because that’s what others were doing.”
Hakim Djaziri at franceinfo Culture
To feed his family, the father goes to markets, the mother does housework. “The irony is that we fled the violence in Algeria to find it in France. At the time, this city was very harsh.” At school, he does not wear the same clothes as the others, speaks French with difficulty, and consequently suffers incredible harassment from his classmates. He then feels that he has only two options: be a victim, or become violent and impose himself by force. He chooses the second: “That’s how the drift started,” he comments soberly. At 16, kicked out of high school, the resentful teenager spends his days holding down walls in the city.
The street takes over. More benchmarks: “I had no control over the dive I was doing.” Violence, petty crime, and then one day, the meeting with “these guys, exactly the same as the ones we had fled to Algeria.” A sinister paradox which plunges his family into deep disarray. In his association with these radicals, he finds "prefabricated answers to existential questions: why are my parents going through this? Why is France doing this to us?" The Islamists' simple explanations, "don't bother, you were born a Muslim, and you are in an enemy country", appease him. Isolation, social rupture, solitude, are broken by entry into a collective which arouses his anger and supervises him.
An improbable encounter with the theater
In life, it's all about encounters, hands outstretched and hands grasped. Coincidences, too. When one evening, wandering far from his city, he sees light passing through a bay window, with people moving on a stage behind, "people my age", he hides in a grove to spy. The scene is that of the Jacques-Prévert theater, in Aulnay, a place to which he has continued to return since that evening.
"At first I cursed them because I thought they were doing something forbidden, I thought they were going to burn in hell. That's what I was taught." But very quickly, amazement takes over: “I realize that I am vibrating with them. I am experiencing what we are experiencing, I share their emotions. It was new.” Caught “like a magnet”, he still cannot explain what happened at that moment, twenty-five years later.
“The applause from the audience was a kind of incredible shock.”
Hakim Djaziri at franceinfo Culture
Two days later, he enrolled in the course, and would live in schizophrenia for the months that followed. Among the radicals, we curse the perverted arts of the West: “It’s completely logical,” explains the actor, “the idea is to keep the individual under control, to isolate him as much as possible, and art is the antithesis of that.” But on Thursday evening, Hakim came back to life. End of the year, show: transported by the applause of the public, the young man found his vocation. "I felt like I was waking up from a nightmare, you know the ones that seem super real and you come away thinking, 'My God, it was just a nightmare!'
He will suddenly leave everything to find a theater teacher in Paris. The start of a journey strewn with pitfalls, but one that he will never let go of. “It was long, tedious, hard, a lot of doors were closed to me: “Not known enough”, “too rebeu”, with all the stereotypes that go with it…” So after his studies, Hakim Djaziri flourished in the theater by writing his own plays, which met with success… At the same time, he joined the Algerian… ping-pong team, with which he toured the world, and even participated in the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. But, in the back of his mind, he always dreams of one day being given the opportunity to play “lots of characters” on screen.
When he was cast for season 5 of Fauda, he knew that the role was for him, but he didn't dare believe it. The team is looking for an actor to play a Palestinian who speaks French: Saïd el-Khatibi is a Hamas commander who leads a European cell from Marseille. For his previous role, that of a character suffering from terminal cancer, Hakim Djaziri had become very thin, the opposite of a fighter. And then, he doesn't speak English, which poses a problem for the filming, which is very international, and his Arabic is Algerian: "Nothing to do with Middle Eastern Arabic, I had to learn it."
But his motivation upsets one of the directors to whom he confides: "There is no one who can interpret your character better than me. I know him by heart, I know exactly what his psychology is, his way of seeing the world, his ideology, his motivations... He has no secrets from me." In two months, the actor will gain 15 kg, with a sports coach and a special nutritional program, learn English which he now speaks fluently, as well as Middle Eastern Arabic. But to stick to a slight Algerian accent that remains, the screenwriters of Fauda modify his character: from Gaza, his story will therefore pass through Algiers, before arriving in Marseille. This is good: Hakim Djaziri doesn't have a Marseille accent at all.
A heavy and moving shoot
The filming? It took place between Budapest for the French scenes, and Israel for the Syrian, Jordanian and Israeli scenes of course. “I stayed there for two months between May and July, it was a joyful cacophony,” smiles the Franco-Algerian. "To be completely honest, I have never experienced a shoot like that. We knew that we were talking about something that was a big trauma, that was visceral. In Israel, everyone knows someone who has lost someone. To counterbalance, we had to be as kind as possible to each other."
Especially since the creators of Fauda, Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff, decided to integrate the events of October 7 into the scenario, after an intense debate. Scenario entirely rewritten, therefore, to insert reality into fiction, a reality which had exceeded in violence all the fictions imagined until then.
When Hakim arrives on set, he joins a team who have known each other for ten years, and who will therefore interpret events that have turned their lives upside down. And what upsets him is the diversity he finds there: "The team is half made up of Muslim Arabs and Jews, who have been making this artistic object for more than ten years. I don't know why people don't want to see that."
Since Fauda, things have taken off: a month later, Hakim Djaziri left to film season 3 of the SAS series Rogue Heroes, created by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders). Four months between London, Belgium and the north of France, working alongside Jack O'Connell, Dominic West, Stephen Woolfenden, "the best in the business: their way of working is incredible". Currently, he is filming an American series, Testament, produced by Netflix, where he plays a Jewish notable, an extremely virtuous man, in total opposition to the character of Fauda. It will then continue with season 2 of Eastern Plain…
When we ask him what his little pleasures are, he tells us that he wants to quit smoking, and that his greatest pleasure is traveling with his 10-year-old daughter, and showing her the world. To see documentaries too, which he watches on the channel… Always open…
We've been talking casually for forty minutes now. Before leaving, I ask him, as usual, if I have forgotten a question. The actor could stick to promotion, but the man wants to drive the point home, and ends with a passionate monologue: "Some people say to me: 'But you're crazy! It's unconscious! You live in France, you will be singled out, you will alienate everyone!" But my position is very simple: I have a relationship with art that is visceral. There is no reason why I should not do my work with Israelis in the same way as I would have done with any other production. I am even convinced that it is a symbol of peace, a positive, optimistic message, to say that despite everything that separates us, in these places, we can still live together, and please people, try to open your minds a little and look at what is beautiful in there. Whether in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Israel or in Yemen, I do not have selective indignation, I suffer equally. Let's stop making people believe that the world is binary, because it is made of nuance. No one is the bearer of the ultimate truth or morality, because it is universal. agree with me, but you have no right to judge me, because I just did my job the best I could."
