In 'Hit & Run,' the 'Fauda' Creators Move the Action to New York

One afternoon in 2015, shortly after their gripping terrorism drama“Fauda” debuted in Israel, Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz met for lunch in Tel Aviv.

They were chatting about a recent hit-and-run accident in the news. Then they began to banter: What if the accident wasn’t an accident, but part of a deeper conspiracy? What if family secrets, and even international intrigue, had been at play?

By the time they called for the check, the idea for “Hit & Run,” a new Netflix thriller premiering globally on Friday, had been born. But they didn’t know that this sophomore show would be the successor to a phenomenon.

“Fauda,” which dove into the gritty, morally murky world of an elite military unit, was picked up by Netflix in 2016 and went on to become a bona fide international hit. In Israel, it was groundbreaking for offering a more nuanced depiction of the Palestinians targeted by its team of undercover operatives, led by Raz’s character, Doron Kavillio. (Though some Palestinian writers have criticized these portrayals and the show, in general.)

Globally, much of its success has been attributed to its sense of realism. Raz and Issacharoff both served in the special forces during their mandatory service in the Israeli military, and much of the drama that makes “Fauda” so riveting is based on events they had experienced.

“Hit & Run,” which moves much of the action to New York City, required more invention. But the themes of loyalty, deception and the ambiguous allegiances of a double agent are once again at play. This time around, Raz and Issacharoff have applied the same creative formula, but adapted it for a global audience.

“Avi and I get inspired from things that happen in the world,” said Raz, who stars as Segev Azulai, a man whose comfortable Tel Aviv life implodes when his American wife is killed in a mysterious hit and run. “This is a show about trust — trust between a husband and wife, and also trust between countries.”

A tense whodunit, the nine-episode series swoops from Tel Aviv to the back alleys of New York, with dialogue primarily in English — a first for Raz. He and Issacharoff created “Hit & Run” with the writer-producers Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin, who most recently partnered on “The Killing.” The cast includes Sanaa Lathan (“The Affair”), Gregg Henry (“Scandal”), Gal Toren (“Losing Alice”) and Moran Rosenblatt (“Fauda”).

For the millions of viewers who hungrily binged three seasons of “Fauda” on Netflix, the parallels between Raz’s characters on the two series will be striking. Again, we begin with Raz ensconced in a quiet, happy family life until, in the opening episode, he is dragged into bloodshed and violence, pulled from his idyll by lingering retributions of an inescapable past.

“Lior and I know that there is some kind of mechanism, an unseen button, where when you push it, someone else comes out of you,” Issacharoff said. “And this is our Segev.”

And again, Raz has infused the show with emotional artifacts from his past. In “Fauda,” he leaned on his experiences with post-traumatic stress disorder to bring Doron to life. In “Hit & Run,” even the names of his characters, including that of Segev’s murdered wife, are loaded with meaning.

Segev spends the series trapped in grief over the loss of Danielle Azulai (Kaelen Ohm), an American dancer whose back story grows murkier in every episode. Raz — who lost a serious girlfriend named Iris Azulai in a Palestinian terror attack when he was 19 — plunged headfirst into his own painful memories to inhabit the story.

“I didn’t talk about Iris for a long time, until Avi and I started to write,” Raz said. “It started with ‘Fauda’ and now, with ‘Hit & Run,’ it’s gone deeper.”

Debuting it on a global stage, rather than from the insular world of Israeli television, put a sense of pressure on the duo’s second act, Issacharoff said. But most of it came from within.

“Everyone had huge expectations on us following ‘Fauda,’” he said. “We knew that we couldn’t come back with a product that was less than excellent.”

They again wrote what they know, drawing on their expertise in spycraft and counterintelligence. But this time around, they zoomed beyond Israel and the Palestinian Territories to crack open global geopolitical secrets.

As Segev barrels through New York, leaving a trail of bloodshed in his search for the truth behind his wife’s death, “Hit & Run” explores themes and questions about citizenship and loyalty, and the dark corners of democratic alliances. Issacharoff, a veteran Israeli journalist whose beat is Arab affairs, said that like “Fauda,” the new series includes twists and subplots that were taken from actual events.

“There are some very sensitive diplomatic and political issues that usually no one talks about, but they are there,” he said.

While Raz is again playing a retired warrior lured back into action — this time a former mercenary rather than a former military officer — there are tonal differences. Segev is softer and older, and he is driven by a desire not for revenge, but to prevent further harm from coming to his family.

“This is closer to who Lior really is,” Prestwich said. “We loved ‘Fauda,’ but we also knew that people like us might not come to an action show if they didn’t feel like there was something else there, and a different world to explore.”

Prestwich and Yorkin served as guides for Raz and Issacharoff as the two men navigated the professional and cultural differences of Hollywood television. Yorkin said she and Prestwich also brought a broader emotional palette to the action-heavy story.

“This is a story that is ultimately about love, and maybe even redemption,” Yorkin said. “We thought it would appeal to a much broader audience.”

In the writers’ room, Prestwich and Yorkin also made a key suggestion: The character of Naomi Hicks, a scoop-hungry Jewish journalist who becomes Segev’s anchor in New York, should be played by a Black woman. Yorkin went a step further, connecting with an organization of Black Jews through her synagogue in Los Angeles, and the team filled in Naomi’s back story as a professional woman who has been a double outsider her entire life.

“Part of her motivation is she is really trying to get the accolades that we all strive for, and that don’t necessarily come to people of color,” said Lathan, who plays Naomi. “It was really fascinating that she is a Black Jew, which is a reality for many people in the world that we don’t see much onscreen.”

The director Mike Barker, who set the visual tone in the pilot, utilized a distinctive color palette to emphasize the two worlds that Segev inhabits: a colorful, nature-rich one in Tel Aviv, and a stark, almost sepia-toned darkness in New York.

“I eliminated the sky, and I borrowed quite heavily from movies from the 1970s, using vintage lenses,” he said of his shoots in New York. When production moved to Tel Aviv, he was struck by how colorful and bright the city was, and shifted gears. “I was thinking of plastic orange beach chairs and blue sunshine, but when I got there, I began to understand how green it was, so we changed the palette,” he said.

Barker added that he was impressed by how fully Raz was willing to pour himself into the role. “There was nothing easy for him in this show,” Barker said. “You’ve got to remember that ‘Fauda’ is all in Hebrew, and this one is Hebrew and English. So he had a huge challenge.”

To reach Segev’s emotional abyss, Barker encouraged Raz, a father of four, to tap into his deep sense of family. “There’s a wall up on his ‘Fauda’ character, which he completely smashes down with a sledgehammer on this show,” Barker said.

For Raz, who has been vocal about working through his own military trauma in “Fauda,” filming “Hit & Run” brought yet another chance to process his past demons.

“This guy is grieving for the whole show. To hold that as an actor for a year of shooting wasn’t easy, but it was a healing process for me about my own loss,” he said. “Both as Segev and Doron, it’s actually me — it’s Lior — that you see in different situations.”