Regardless of whether you will watch, are watching or have watched Hulu’s “We Were the Lucky Ones,” you might have noticed something remarkable about it. In this show about a Polish Jewish family’s survival during the Holocaust (adapted from the Georgia Hunter novel of the same name), the entire main cast is Jewish. Lior Ashkenazi and Robin Weigert play Sol and Nechuma Kurc, the patriarch and matriarch of the Kurc clan. Logan Lerman plays Addy Kurc, Joey King plays Halina Kurc, Amit Rahav plays Jakub Kurc and Michael Aloni plays Selim. However, there are a couple of actors that might be more unknown to American audiences like Sam Woolf and Hadas Yaron.
Here are 18 things to know about Hadas.
1. She was born in 1990 in Israel to a secular Jewish family.
2. Hadas grew up in Tel Aviv.
3. This is what Hadas and her brother looked like as young kids!
4. Hadas has been acting since the age of eight and was cast in her first film when she was 14. The movie “Out of Sight” tells the story of a blind Israeli woman seeking to understand why her cousin Talia died by suicide. Hadas played Talia as a child in flashbacks.
5. She attended Tichon Eroni Alef Art School and fulfilled her mandatory IDF service afterwards. She has described joining the military as “a pause in your life.”
6. Her breakout role was Shira in Rama Burshtein’s 2012 film “Fill the Void.”
“Hadas came towards the end of the process. I had seen everyone in Israel, but then she walked in and started the audition and I just burst out laughing like crazy because I knew that I had found her,” Burshtein said in an interview. “The beauty of Hadas is that she didn’t really understand what was happening. At one point I said to her, Hadas, you’re 20 and you might be a huge star, what are you gonna do? She just smiled at me — this not understanding is really her beauty and what came through so well in the character of Shira.”
7. In order to prepare to play a Hasidic Jewish character in the movie, Hadas attended an Orthodox wedding and a circumcision, met with a rabbi and learned Hebrew blessings.
“There’s something so beautiful about it because you’re being so grateful all the time for everything you do and hoping that everything works out okay and I started doing those blessings every day and it sounds silly but it helps you feel that you are closer to the character,” she told Backstage.
8. She won best actress at the Venice Film Festival that year and at the Ophir Awards.
9. When she won the Venice Film Festival award, Hadas was still working as a waitress at a coffee shop.
“It’s funny that one night you’re in an evening gown and the next you’re back to serving coffee in the cafe,” she said.
10. Funnily enough, the cafe owner said she wasn’t a very good waitress. “She trips and falls over everything,” he said in an interview.
11. Other movies Hadas has been in include “Felix and Meira,” “Mary Magdelene” and “Troppa grazia.”
12. She is also known for playing Libbi Shtisel on the hit TV show “Shtisel.”
13. The most difficult scene for her to shoot in “Shtisel” was when Libbi gets upset at Akiva (her cousin and fiancé) for painting.
“I remember the scene where she sees he’s painting again,” Yaron told the New York Jewish Week. “It was difficult. I was thinking that for Libbi, this was a betrayal. When he painted, it was like he had sex with a woman. He broke his word. It was so big to her. Even if I as Hadas would look at it differently, I just had to remind myself that for her, this is the biggest thing because she wants to marry him but she can’t if he can’t keep his word.”
14. According to IMDb, she’s fluent in Italian!
15. She has a very cute cat.
16. Hadas plays Mila Kurc in Hulu’s “We Were the Lucky Ones.” When her casting was announced, she wrote, “This series is deeply personal to me — reading about Georgia Hunter’s family, felt like I was reading about my own family. Been thinking a lot about my grandmothers these days.”
17. “7 months of work and life with a bunch of truly the best people and most beautiful souls,” she wrote on Instagram when the show wrapped filming. “I’m probably gonna talk about this project a lot in the future so for now I’m just gonna put this pic of our team here, and thank goodness for all the people that walked into my life on this special job.”
18. She attended Joey King‘s wedding with fellow “We Were the Lucky Ones” cast members Logan Lerman and Amit Rahav.
