u/Axodique

Yes, this is AI translated. I'm not a fan of it, but translation is one of the valid use cases

ORIGINAL INTERVIEW

**"I ignited the engines. You could romantically call it a death wish."**

He went to the army and returned with nightmares from what he and his friends did in the territories. In India, he swallowed whatever he could get his hands on and only stopped after seeing the abyss staring back at him up close. In Tel Aviv, he studied acting but focused on drinking, girls, and bar fights with criminals. Tomer Capone, the star of 'Taagad' [Charlie Golf One] and winner of the Israeli Oscar, is just glad he is alive. Bonus: Being the hottest actor on the screen.

In his role as Daniel in 'Taagad', Tomer Capone is used to managing events involving casualties, hysteria, and flowing blood. A moment after filming ended, he stumbled upon a scene that wasn't in the script for the new hit yes series: "I was at the beach with my girlfriend, we wanted to eat in Jaffa. Suddenly, a motorcyclist arrived, sped up, and crashed into a car taking a turn. The character of Daniel the Battalion Medic took over me: I sprinted to the wounded guy, shouting at people, 'Call for help immediately!' The guy was unconscious, bleeding everywhere. I realized he was starting to choke on his own blood, so I took the risk of taking off his helmet. While yelling at onlookers to give me space to work, I stuck two fingers into his mouth and cleared out the fluids; I pulled five or six teeth out. I saw he was losing blood from his leg, so I tore his jeans, took off my shirt, and made a tourniquet to stop the hemorrhaging. The ambulance arrived, and I gave them his vitals—'I opened an airway for him,' 'He regained consciousness a few minutes ago'—everything just like a good Battalion Medic."

This scene earned him applause from bystanders, but now it brings up another memory. "The story in India," he says, processing the connection between traumatic events he's experienced or witnessed and his military service. "I wasn't thinking about it at all. I was at a crazy party in Goa, dancing all night with friends, chaos, and everything. After the party, I went to an internet cafe, and three Brits—a mother, father, and child—walked in, screaming, 'Call an ambulance!' We ran to the beach. A beat-up boat arrived, and on the bow lay a young guy with his entire leg laid open. Suddenly, I get hit with this trip from the army. There are two Indian guys there, and I start tossing them around, barking orders in Hebrew—we get a plank, use it as a stretcher, and I am fucking back in the army, for real, it's a rolling incident. We start running, stretcher, I close an open wound, a beat-up car arrives, I put him in, step out of the ambulance, and I’m caught in this terrible loop, completely covered in blood. And then the mother's hand touches my back—and suddenly I wake up from it."

× × ×

**"I don't want to play soldiers, take it away from me." Taagad**

Tomer Capone’s career, at 31, is skyrocketing. "That handsome guy, you know, from 'Fauda'" is now dealing with titles like "the new Oz Zehavi." A combination of talent, charisma, and sex appeal makes the comparison easy. Too easy. He cut his teeth in supporting roles as one of the family's kidnappers in Ayelet Zurer's 'Hostages', in 'A Tale of Love and Darkness', the American 'Dig' created by Gidi Raff, 'Paper Wedding', and of course, as the volatile undercover soldier in 'Fauda'. But now he is the hottest thing on any screen—the fresh winner of the Israeli Oscar for a charming supporting role in the film 'One Week and a Day' alongside Shai Avivi and Evgenia Dodina; the lead in the daily drama 'Taagad' (40 episodes); cast as a commando in Jose Padilha's ('Narcos') adaptation of 'Entebbe'; and in two months, he will star in another lead role in a 100-episode daily series on HOT called 'Full Moon', alongside his partner of four and a half years, actress Ortal Ben-Shoshan. In 'Full Moon', he plays Idan, an elite unit soldier who lost his memory in an operational accident. Four years after his discharge, Idan lives in Thailand, detached from reality, running a commune for Israelis who have lost their way. Capone knows this story of the army-East-detachment pipeline closely. Too closely.

"I enlisted in 2004. I was a combat soldier in a battalion and also a commander of young soldiers. Most of the time I was flying high, an amazing feeling. Me and the friends from our fighting Indian tribe, closing 38 days at an outpost, rolling tea leaves to smoke because we ran out of cigarettes, farting on each other, crazy laughs. On weekends you go home so horny, tired, and hungry, and you just swallow the world. It started out amazing."

And the rest was complicated.

"Yes. For example, going out on a lot of arrests of wanted individuals. One time we went to arrest a woman in Nablus. As a soldier, you just know she is wanted; you are simply the pipe that transfers her to the Shin Bet. I remember being intensely focused on the mission, not thinking too much about emotional matters.

**Audition Prep: Don't Shower. One Week and a Day**

In the middle of the night, you enter a family's house. You aren't aggressive, but the family won't easily let you take their 18-year-old daughter, and a struggle begins. Shoving, cursing, and we tear her away and drive off. We arrive, pull her out of the vehicle, she's zip-tied, and I grab her by the arm. She isn't fighting back, but she relaxes her grip from mine, signaling me to hold her hand more gently. Her eyes, of course, are blindfolded with flannel. I bring her into a room, put her inside, and see eight other girls in there who look more or less identical. And they shut the door in your face. This was at the end of my service, and suddenly, right there, something happened to me. I went to the side, took off my gear, and just fell apart; everything drained into that moment."

What does it mean to fall apart?

"I took my vest and weapon and smashed them into everything in the room. I broke things, went wild—a rage attack, crying, laughing, completely losing my mind. The army sent me to talk to someone, but she couldn't handle me. After the first session, she said, 'I think you should look for a different therapist.' I think I scared her a little."

You served in very complex situations. The territories, the Disengagement.

"During the Disengagement, you stand there on guard, and older people come up to you and scream 'Nazi' at you while you're in uniform. After that, you serve in Nablus and stand at the Huwara checkpoint, refusing to let a father pass with his sick daughter who needs to get to the hospital because the orders are to let no one through. The next day, you arrest someone and find a weapon in his drawer. You and your friends jump on him and beat the crap out of him. Another day, we went on a week-long operation inside the Nablus Kasbah, and I was the commander. Kids threw stones at us, there were riots, and my friend fired a bullet. Pressure, chaos. And so many moments of breaking down, of playing pranks at checkpoints, of impatience, the most banal stories—someone is transporting a truckload of fruit, so you dismantle his entire truck and crack open all his watermelons, just for a laugh. Or taking a bag of his fruit without him even knowing and telling him, 'Yallah, drive,' simply because you've been standing there for hours and you want to die."

The Second Lebanon War caught you during your mandatory service.

"Right on the verge of my discharge. There was a feeling of confusion and chaos. We waited on the border, listening to the horrific stories. Several of my friends were killed in the war. A friend from the commanders' course called me to tell me my friend was dead, and you have to hold it together because you have soldiers; you have to function. Other friends refused orders and went to military prison. And I understood them—we were told there was going to be an incursion, and we preferred not to do it because we knew we would die. So you eat it, just like you eat your military rations, and you pay the price when you get out."

**A Good Girl from Zikhron Yaakov. Portman**

× × ×

Capone didn't just leave the army. He was shot out of it like a cannonball. "On the day of my discharge, my grandfather, who basically raised me my entire life, suddenly passed away. A week later, I was already in India. I went there not knowing how it would end—I didn't care if I died. You run away to fall apart, to let out the things you feel uncomfortable letting out here. When I got to India, I ignited the engines. You could romantically call it a 'death wish'. I felt I needed to feel, after being disconnected for so many years. I did everything of everything. Someone offered me something? I took it, swallowed it, ate it, snorted it, drank it, smoked it."

Describe the escape route.

"It started out charmingly, but you can't run away from yourself. Very quickly, I strayed from the conventional trip and looked for the darkest corners. At first, it was drugs, as much as possible. To test the limits, to push yourself to the edge, anything to forget. Drugs are an inseparable part of life. There's this taboo in Israel about drugs—fuck that! There are good drugs, there are bad drugs—I tasted them all. There are no bad drug trips; there are *your* bad trips, which, for someone with my baggage, turn into something incredibly powerful under the influence of drugs. I tried to escape reality into hallucinations. That means sitting in a tree over a river with thoughts racing through your brain at 250 km/h—about your childhood, the army, things splitting wide open. Tons of hallucinations, lots of paranoia, lots of smiles."

What was your mental state?

"Very bad. At some point, I lost it. I looked in the mirror and saw a Joker pretending everything was fine. I really don't think I fully understand what I went through out there, even to this day. Listen, I went crazy there. I lost my mind quite a few times. There’s that saying—'Everyone needs a place where they can go crazy in peace.' I was there for a year, mostly in Goa, alone. Dancing a lot, all kinds of parties. Or riding my motorcycle. Some trippy guy got on my bike, took me to a lake to meditate, and I just broke down next to him, crying and laughing. He put me in the water, grabbed my head, and dunked me—ritualistic things that release you from the chains you've been carrying."

Like what, for example?

"Someone told me a friend from the army was supposed to arrive. He was kind of a clumsy soldier, and I waited for him just to see that he was okay. We are on vacation in India, but I was terribly worried about him, I can't explain it. And then he arrived—I hugged him and started crying. Then I went to his room, pouring out this flood of words about everything I was going through, just a bit unhinged. I remember him grabbing me and saying, 'Tomer, we aren't in the army anymore. We're not in the army anymore.'"

But you hadn't been discharged internally.

"The whole time I was there, the army was running right alongside me. That’s where these things open up. In the army, you don't think about what you did, to whom, why, how, what—you don't deal with ideology, you don't think about it at all. Arabs? I was a kid in the 90s, Arabs carried out bombings, and I was completely busy watching *Samurai Pizza Cats*. And then you get to the army, you are exposed a bit to how they live, and in India, you start seeing outside the box. Eventually, I got tired—mentally, spiritually, physically—from the thoughts, from the running away, from obsessing over it. I had my foot on the gas the entire time, and eventually, I got a kick in the face, because I asked for it."

What did the kick look like?

"A few of us were hanging out—an Israeli guy, some Russian guys, and me. There were all kinds of hard drugs going around, and we were part of the party. I don't remember what happened that night, but I do remember waking up on the beach the next morning to crying and screaming. We ran to a distant tent, and there was an ambulance, and a girl from our group was covered up, dead. She had gone into the water under the influence of ketamine; it's an anesthetic, a tranquilizer, basically used to anesthetize horses. There's a state you reach while high where you see all sorts of things in your brain, it's called a K-hole—she dove too deep into the water in that state and simply drowned. It made me say, 'In one more second, that's me.' I picked myself up and called home. My grandmother answered. I don't know why, she just asked me, 'Is everything okay with you? Is everything okay in your head?' I started to break down a little: 'Grandma, I want someone to come take me away from this after-school club.'"

Capone doesn't want to elaborate on his return to Israel. It seems he hasn't fully digested it himself yet, but he explains it was a massive slap in the face. "I didn't come back completely 'Zen', but with a lot of baggage. I was completely lost. The only thing I knew was that I loved animals, especially horses. I had a childhood memory of my grandfather and father taking me riding on Saturdays, and I clung to it. I started traveling around and working on horse farms in the north and south; that was the real therapy that saved me. Working with animals and children was amazing. I also tried psychological therapy, going in and out many times. That whole 'talking yourself out' thing doesn't work as well for me. I reconnected with many friends from the army—meeting them, reminiscing, talking about it, returning to reality. I got my head in order."

A lot of soldiers lose themselves after their discharge.

"I have friends who, to this day, cannot find their direction because they went through something hard in the army that scratched their souls and made them lose it. I am like that. Look at me—that's me! It was a total fluke that I'm alive, standing on my own two feet, doing what I do. I know many soldiers who got out and their lives went straight to hell. But we also pay the price because of our government. Who runs the country today? A collection of puppets who only care about their personal needs, and I, as a soldier, pay the price because they are populist, hypocritical, lying people who only care about their own asses and interests. The conversations with my friends usually end with them saying they never want their kids to go through what they went through. After the army, you realize it inside—you were just a puppet on a string serving something else."

× × ×

When we meet, he is right in the middle of taking a selfie with a guy who asked. Five minutes later, another one approaches. He isn't used to it yet. He landed from Thailand just a few days ago after a month of filming and hasn't had time to feel the full weight of his new status. For now, he's enjoying it. He grew up in Holon and Rishon LeZion, the second son of parents he describes as "businesspeople" without elaborating. He shares that up until age 12, he had a happy childhood, and then came a financial collapse that threatened to bury the family. "Life changed. You downsize, you understand what 'nothing' means. It made my parents search for ways out of the mess, which meant they were around less. That led my grandparents to raise me and my brother.

"Our house was under all sorts of court orders. Repossessors and debt collectors came often. You come home from school, and suddenly someone knocks on the door asking if mom and dad are home. I wouldn't open it. A big guy shows up with a van, rings the intercom, and you just don't answer; you watch him from the window upstairs until he leaves. My parents are truly rare people, they fought hard. They did everything they could so we wouldn't see the harsher things I am sure they went through."

It changed you.

"The only thing that bothered me was the financial issue. I was constantly worried about my parents, so my grades slipped, and I got in trouble a lot at school with teachers, being late. Kids smell fear, and I was terrified for my family during that time. From being a highly popular kid and an athlete, I became an outsider. I started skipping school a lot to work. I'd wake up at six in the morning before school, work for two hours at a food market in a commercial center in Rishon, setting up tables, go to school, and then return to the market to take the tables down. I washed cars for the neighbors. My brother would burn CDs with games for me, and I would sell them to kids, 80 shekels a disc. Today, suddenly they pay me, but when I studied acting, I worked as a delivery guy for pennies."

An experience like that shapes your view on money and its centrality in our lives. What did you learn?

"What happened gave me a huge ambition to succeed. I learned that when you have everything, you can lose it in a second. So I don't save, nor do I live in a luxury tower; I let myself have whatever I want. I'll walk into a toy store today and buy out the place, ostensibly for my nephews, but really for myself."

And yet, you chose a financially unstable profession.

"To tell you that the situation for actors in Israel is shitty? It's shitty. To say I'm not scared to death about my future and my children's future? I think about it a lot. I also have many thoughts about doing things outside of acting. I look for opportunities—horse farms, I saw a special ice cream truck abroad that I want to bring here. During my first few weeks at Yoram Levinstein's [acting school], I physically grabbed one of my teachers and said, 'I need you to tell me something: am I going to make money in this profession, or am I wasting my time?' People in acting schools live a bit in a 'Big Brother' atmosphere—just laughs and having fun. I came to acquire a profession."

How did it go?

"After a year, Yoram kicked me the hell out. It was one of the most thrilling periods of my life. I lived in a rented shoebox in the Hatikva neighborhood. From the first moment I stepped on stage, I found my place—I came home. I stood out very quickly: desirable, popular, good roles. There are a lot of sharp elbows there, and boys who aren't happy to see you getting roles. The girls were happier to see me in the morning. I let loose very quickly. I thought that to live life on the edge on stage, I also needed to live on the edge outside. And that's what I did. I kicked a table in the middle of a scene and broke three toes, or I bit someone's ear and wounded him during a scene."

Dramatic.

"You can't count the number of times I got kicked out for disciplinary problems, lateness, or not showing up. The last thing that interested me were the plays of Hamlet and Chekhov; I was more interested in everything around it—the partying, the people, the girls. I didn't feel deprived in that area. You take someone who lives on farms with animals and drop that animal into the jungle of Tel Aviv, and the animal comes out. I found the playground there that I didn't have as a child, and they totally provided it for me. I partied constantly, drank constantly; it was wild, a very blurry period of my life. The fatigue too, the lack of order. You wake up at six in the morning with a hangover, you're supposed to rehearse, and then you have to get on stage. You finish school at six in the evening, by eight you're on your scooter heading to work, and then you go out."

Give an example of a wild story.

"We were celebrating the birthday of an older friend of mine. We were at some place, and there were criminals there. Suddenly a fight broke out; they argued with him over some chair. I was completely drunk and terribly worried about him. I jumped on them. I remember taking a bottle to the face, my head split open. I grabbed someone and bit his neck, they threw me off, kicking me and my friends. I'm standing in the middle of the bar, completely beaten to a pulp, trying to defend myself with a bottle, unable to see anything because my entire face is covered in blood. Afterwards, we went to the ER, and they stitched my head up. The next day, I showed up to an acting class called 'The Actor's Work on Himself'."

× × ×

As mentioned, he didn't survive acting school, but the school of life gave him a chance. He got his first job four years ago playing the sensitive kidnapper in 'Hostages', but his real breakthrough came with 'Fauda'. Capone decided to create a crash course for himself to become an undercover operative. "I started drinking protein shakes and gaining muscle mass. I went to a Krav Maga instructor to beat the crap out of me; I simply asked him to hit me as much as possible." Then he went on a rogue undercover mission.

"I found an undercover operative my age upon whom I based my character. I knew a little Arabic from the army, I started intensive lessons, and the operative gave me a mission in Jaffa: to get a group of guys in a specific coffee shop in Jaffa to invite me to smoke hookah with them. The idea was that they wouldn't ask me where I was from, but rather that I would find out as much information about them as possible. I walked in acting like a weirdo, a bit confused, speaking half-Hebrew, half-Arabic. I said I was lost, my wallet disappeared, and I needed to get back home to Ashdod. By the end of the evening, I was sitting around a hookah with a clan of young guys, talking with them about their lives in Jaffa, about politics, about work, and about their uncle from Nablus. At the end, they even gave me money for a taxi. Since the show aired, I do not walk past that coffee shop."

You had a traumatic final scene in the series—you wear a suicide vest and get blown up.

"They brought a cannon, put pieces of meat from a butcher shop inside, and I stood to the side watching various organs—supposedly mine—fly into the air and hit the floor. Afterwards, they stood me next to those pieces of meat, and two production assistants threw buckets of dirt on me from both sides. I'm standing there sweating, surrounded by bloody chunks of organs."

After that explosion came an interesting offer from one Natalie Portman. "I was riding my bike on Allenby Street and got a call from my agency: 'Natalie Portman wants to meet you tonight.' I burst out laughing. I was near a bookstore, so I bought 'A Tale of Love and Darkness'. It's about 600 pages, and I managed to read a little over half of it. I met her in the most dingy offices you can imagine, the absolute opposite of Hollywood. She smiled at me, I smiled at her. She looks like a sweet, good girl from Zikhron Yaakov. I play the Israeli pioneer from the old vintage posters, the one who represents what immigrants thought they would find in the Land of Israel. I asked her, 'So I'm your fantasy?' She laughed a lot." He got the job, and then came another international offer.

"A pilot for a Hollywood series on ABC, *Of Kings and Prophets*. A biblical soap opera. I played one of the lead roles—King David's army commander, Joab son of Zeruiah. I realized it wasn't good enough during the script reading phase, but after a project like that, you can afford not to work for a year. They shot it in Cape Town, South Africa. They fly you first class, you don't even have time to burp before they're asking you, 'What do you need?' There was a guy my height, looked a bit like me, holding a sign that said 'Tomer Capone / Joab son of Zeruiah', standing there for the camera setup. When the cameras are ready, they knock on your trailer and say, 'Mr. Capone, we are ready for you.' There was a guy assigned to me named Mario, whose entire job was to make sure I was comfortable. He became my only real friend on set."

Doesn't sound so terrible.

"No. I found myself on a horse with a sword, yelling in English, 'Into battle!' The horse is galloping, I'm dressed in biblical Joab son of Zeruiah gear, I look back, see a hundred extras behind me, and the camera is right on me. Ecstasy. During the pilot, everyone kept talking about whether it would be picked up for a series and if we'd all become millionaires. It was pretty clear to me it wouldn't work out, and my head wasn't really there anyway."

Where was it?

"Before that, I had auditioned for 'One Week and a Day' and got the role of Zooler, a post-army stoner. It was the complete opposite of the characters I had played up to that point. I was a different kind of stoner—a hardcore one."

How do you get into the role of a stoner?

"Before the audition, I didn't shower for two days, I watched *The Big Lebowski* on a loop, shoved a piece of cardboard between my teeth to give myself a black gap, and slouched my knees. When I was in Cape Town, I worked on the role with Asaf Polonsky, the director, via Skype. We talked about losing weight, becoming this skinny scooter rider, but we realized a diet would just make me ripped. I realized I was in roughly the most culinary country in the world—and I went on a two-week binge, gaining eight kilos."

And after that, you had to lose it all to play a soldier in 'Taagad'.

"At first, I didn't want to do it. They sent me an audition without a specific role attached. They told me, 'It's about soldiers.' I said, 'Enough, I don't want to play soldiers anymore, take it away from me, I don't want to come.' A few months passed, and they called saying they couldn't find the character for Daniel the Medic. Taagad [the battalion medical clinic] is the biggest brothel in the IDF. Boys and girls together, hormones raging at age 18, and they do absolutely nothing all day. It was a correction for my own hardcore army experience. There's the sheep belonging to Ben-Lulu in the show, and I remembered we used to visit the female observers on patrol, drive up to Mount Bracha, and watch on their screens as shepherds took the sheep out to pasture and sodomized them."

Good thing you were discharged. You're becoming a star, are you starting to realize it?

"No, not yet, I haven't grasped it. I'm still going to pick up my dog's poop every morning. They opened an Instagram for me two weeks ago; I never had a Facebook, so this is new to me. And suddenly everyone is calling me 'Hogdus' [nickname for the medic]. I like it. Not like after 'Fauda', when people would see me in the street and scream at me, 'You're alive! You're alive!'"

TL;DR:

The full interview reveals that the specific incident with the 18-year-old girl was the exact moment his mind snapped. Immediately after it happened, he suffered a total psychological collapse, smashed his weapon and gear in a blind rage, and broke down crying. The military therapist was so disturbed by his reaction that he was discharged.

He subsequently fled to India and nearly destroyed himself abusing hard drugs (ketamine, psychedelics) in a desperate attempt to cope with severe PTSD and erase the horrific memories of his service. Furthermore, he explicitly calls out the Israeli politicians running the country as corrupt, lying hypocrites who sacrifice young people for their own agendas.