Michael Aloni

Aloni was born in Tel Aviv to a secular Jewish family. He had a Bar Mitzvah at age 13.[1] His mother is an attorney and his father is an accountant. During his military service in the Israel Defense Forces, he served as a Gadna commander in the Marva training program of the Education Corps.

He studied acting at the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio between 2006–2009. He also appeared in a number of advertising campaigns as a male model.[2]

Aloni had a breakout role as Adam Halevi for three seasons on the hit teen drama, HaShminiya (2005-2007).[3] He became a household name in Israel during his time on the show.[3] He has since described this as his favorite role: "There's something primal about your first role that stays with you."[3]

In 2012, he starred in the critically-acclaimed LGBT film, Out in the Dark. He portrayed Roy, an Israeli Jewish lawyer in Tel Aviv who begins a relationship with a Palestinian man from the West Bank.[4] The American film critic Rex Reed praised the film in The New York Observer: "It’s one of the most powerful films about the Arab-Israeli conflict that has ever been attempted on the screen."[5] Reed commended Aloni's "outstanding" performance.[5]

In 2013, he was cast as Akiva Shtisel, a young Haredi man, in the yes family drama series, Shtisel (2013-2021).[6] Already a hit show in Israel, it also became popular with international audiences when Netflix began streaming the series in 2018.[7] He spent three months preparing for the role: “I spent Shabbos with a charedi family, and we needed to learn Yiddish and a different kind of Hebrew, loshen hakodesh, from the one we speak day-to-day. We learned prayers and the rules of Jewish law. We had to learn everything from scratch. I loved it,”.[1]

He also starred in the Keshet series, When Heroes Fly (2017) alongside Tomer Capone. In April 2018, it won the best series at Canneseries.[8]

In 2021, he appeared alongside Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac in the HBO miniseries, Scenes from a Marriage. It is an English-language remake of the 1973 Swedish miniseries of the same name by Ingmar Bergman.[9][10]

He was cast as Gabriel Ermosa in The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem (2021-2023).[11] The series is set during Ottoman rule and subsequently under the British Mandate for Palestine. Aloni played the son of a prosperous merchant Sephardi family. He fell in love with an Ashkenazi woman, but is pressured by his family into marrying a Sephardi woman.[12]

In 2024, he appeared in the Hulu limited series, We Were the Lucky Ones, based on a book of the same name by Georgia Hunter. It tells the true life story of the Kurc family in Poland who survived the Holocaust. Aloni plays Selim, a doctor and the husband of Mila (Hadas Yaron).[13] Aloni previously played Yaron's on-screen husband when the pair portrayed the roles of Akiva and Libbi Shtisel in Shtisel.[14]

• Michael Aloni at IMDb