The TV character of Moishe Upnik from the happy days of “Sesame Street” does not give rest to actor Jill Ben-David, a dubber and operator of the mythological doll. “Wherever I go, it haunts me and creates hallucinatory situations,” he says. “I was traveling with my sons in Montreal, Canada, almost the farthest from the country, and suddenly someone overtook us, turned to me and asked, ‘Could it be that you are a Moishe Upnik?’ I knew? ‘By the voice’ “.
These days, Ben-David, 66, is rehearsing for the play “The Crazy – Epilogue,” written by Edo Seter following “The Crazy of His Loads,” the hit play by Jean Giroudo, which will be staged tomorrow at the “Created” theater in Bat Yam, directed by Eran Bohm. In the play, which is described as a “comic fantasy with a bad ending about greed, lust for power and the destruction of the environment,” Ben-David continues with the character’s irritability from “Sesame Street.” “Here I go even further and play Dean Nikhuner, the bad guy, an unscrupulous realist, who threatens to close the theater and build high-rises on its ruins to cut himself an oil coupon,” he says. “I am so identified with this bike, that there are people in the audience who are surprised to find that I am also a true actor.”
Do you like to play the bad guys?
“I love them. It allows me to bring out all the aggression on stage and allows me to come home calm. ”
Ben-David was promoted to the role of Upnik in 1985, when he was a young actor after studying theater at Tel Aviv University. “I was then sure I was going to change the art world,” he says. God willing and a friend, who studied film at the same time as me, was appointed assistant director at Sesame Street when the series arrived in Israel. ‘Let me at least once feel what an audition is,’ I turned to him. ‘There are no roles for actors, only for puppet operators,’ he tried to cool my enthusiasm. ‘Let it be,’ I said, and for the first time in my life I grabbed a TV doll. The rest – history. “
How did you get in without previous experience?
“For that, you do not need experience, nor game talent, but coordination and the ability to endure holding the doll in photographs without being seen by the operator. For years, no one knew I was Moishe Upnik. “
Does not that frustrate you?
“really no. I did a good program on educational television, and through it I educated generations. In this respect, I do not belong to the celebrity culture that has taken over us. “
The character of Upnik burst into consciousness in the first episode of the series, as he stormed into the frame with his auto-Trenta, got stuck and never stopped getting upset. With this doll, Ben-David succeeded in all the incarnations of the series, with Upnik remaining in every 40-year-old situation, while the children’s audience, which in his eyes is the best audience in the world, is constantly changing.
Did a puncture happen to you while operating his doll?
“Oh. As is well known, eyebrows are one of his hallmarks. It happened that the spring came loose, the eyelids fell out and it was impossible to activate the eyebrows. what do you know. Called Sesame’s parent company in the United States, and I did an online brain surgery with the company. When the filming was over, the doll was sent for a more massive operation abroad.
To the roof
Ben-David was born in Casablanca, Morocco and grew up in Paris, his favorite city, whose love he expresses in a performance of songs by Georges Bressans in Hebrew versions by his friend, Kobi Meidan. When he immigrated to Israel in ’69 as a 14-year-old boy, he received a cultural shock, or as he puts it, “a slap in the face, from which to this day my ears ring.” He, the son of an engineer and a nurse, grew up in Kiron, a neighborhood in Kiryat Ono, and wanted to be an actor from the age of eight. “To this day, my father does not accept the fact that I, a graduate of a real course, did not continue in that direction,” he says.
After studying theater, he wandered for years between repertory theaters until Moishe Upnik “snatched” him from them. “Twice Hanoch Levin offered me to participate in his plays, and I had to give up because I was committed to filming ‘Sesame Street,'” he says. “So I made a decision to move to some extent from the theater. It happened after I was lucky enough to play ‘Bridge’ with a great director like Yevgeny Arie, with whom I experienced Russian theater at its best. “
Ben-David is often featured in TV series and movies. He’s one of the actors who is not considered a star, but their moments of glory are accumulated from episode to episode. “Players in the country do not have many choices, and the things that come, are what you take,” he says. “I have no complaints. “I have a profession that I love and I have an amazing wife, three wonderful sons and a lovely grandson, but as someone who came here from ‘Paris’ (Paris), what can I tell you, there is not so much culture in the country.”
But there is a “nice butterfly”, in which you activate the captive doll in the new version.
“It’s something that came to me a year ago at a late stage in my career. And I what it enjoys. When they renewed ‘Nice Butterfly’ and turned to the original actors, they of course turned to my dear father, a very good friend of mine, who would return to the character of Shabby. But when he gave up, director Bobby Lex, with whom I worked a lot on dolls, turned to me. I try to give the captives a voice similar to the one my father made so that it would not be completely unfamiliar to the children. “
Moishe Upnik is not jealous?
“No way! The difference between them as between heaven and earth. “This ‘nice butterfly’ for children at a younger age and everything accordingly, including the budget, while on ‘Sesame Street’ it is much larger, and the content is completely different.”
He currently lives in Ramat Hasharon and has been remarried for 35 years to Dalit, a dance major coordinator at Urban A High School, after a brief marriage to an American Jew. “Of both of us she is, my northern star, the more talented,” he notes.
Where are you running away from it all?
“To the roof. We have a roof with lots of views all around, and there is no nicer pleasure than sitting there with a drink and a good book, always in French. I even read Josephus Flavius’ “Jewish Wars” in this language. ”