Beauty Actress Ayelet ZurerIsraeli actress Ayelet Zurer subscribes to a more complicated, multidimensional vision of female strength — one that she brings to her first Hollywood could-be blockbuster, Ron Howard’s “Angels & Demons,” opening Friday.
The 39-year-old, sometimes referred to as the Julia Roberts of Israel, first burst into American consciousness four years ago as the luminously beautiful pregnant wife of the Israeli terrorist-hunter portrayed by Eric Bana in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” then turned around to play a fierce, seductive terrorist herself in “Vantage Point.”
Now Zurer steps up as Tom Hanks’ brainy cohort in the follow-up to Howard’s “The Da Vinci Code.” This ruthlessly efficient, beautifully designed film could be called “24, the Papal Edition,” down to the time stamps that appear on-screen every 10 minutes or so. Again Hanks dons the role of Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, albeit with fewer pounds and better hair than last time.
Ayelet ZurerZurer takes on the role of truth-seeking Italian physicist Vittoria Vetra. The plot revolves around a secret society of vengeful intellectuals, the Illuminati, who want to get back at the science-scorning Catholic Church of history by killing cardinals every hour on the hour and planting under Vatican City an explosive canister of antimatter, which Langdon must find and dispose of within 24 hours with Vetra’s help. According to Howard, Zurer beat out eight other actresses who screen-tested with Hanks. “There’s something very un-self-conscious and honest and earthy about Ayelet,” Howard says, “and yet she has the capacity to deal with the scientific jargon in a way that felt honest, and she felt comfortable with it.”
Trying to explain the exact nature of antimatter — a real phenomenon produced in CERN, a laboratory in Switzerland — is not for the physics-challenged. “Don’t read about it,” Zurer offers helpfully. “There are certain people like me who can’t read and understand at the same time. If you go to YouTube and see it online, you’d understand. It’s somehow easier to understand when you have a painting.” Make that “a visual,” but English is not Zurer’s first language.
Trying to explain the exact nature of antimatter — a real phenomenon produced in CERN, a laboratory in Switzerland — is not for the physics-challenged. “Don’t read about it,” Zurer offers helpfully. “There are certain people like me who can’t read and understand at the same time. If you go to YouTube and see it online, you’d understand. It’s somehow easier to understand when you have a painting.” Make that “a visual,” but English is not Zurer’s first language.
Sexy Ayelet ZurerZurer, who now lives in the United States, actually did read extensively about antimatter and even spent two days trolling the hallways of CERN to prepare for the role. She also interviewed the head of the astronomy department at the University of California, Los Angeles, a female scientist who divides women in science into two types — those who behave like men to get along in their male-dominated field and those who are “highly feminine, and would wear high heels, and who would like to be the center of attention as one of the only women in the lecture room.” Zurer’s character descends from the more womanly tradition. “I think ‘driven’ would be the right term for Vittoria. She’s used to saying what’s on her mind,” she says.
“I knew from Ron, he wanted a very realistic sense of the character rather than that brave superhero from the book with long legs, great skin and great intelligence, but at the same time, I don’t know how real she’d feel if you saw her on-screen running in shorts. He said the realer, the better.” Despite her lighthearted demeanor, Zurer seems to possess a subtle stoic quality, which might be genetic or simply the product of growing up in the Middle East. Her mother, as a 5-year-old in Czechoslovakia, lived through World War II by hiding out in a convent, and later reunited with her family for only a year in the forest. In the ’50s, she immigrated to Israel and ultimately married Zurer’s father, a government worker who painted on the side.
Hot Ayelet ZurerThere were oil paints in Zurer’s Tel Aviv home, and “everybody expected me to do something with painting,” but then genes overtook her, she explains. “What happened was I became this pretty girl from a non-pretty girl and was dragged into doing all kinds of things on stage. I found it to be really fun but never thought I’d pursue it because I was too shy.”
She did her required army stint — singing for the troops as part of a special arts division. She admits that whenever she’s asked about her army experience, “I always get this redness in my skin and face. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t carry a gun, thank you very much.”
At 21, she went to Japan to try modeling, a stint that lasted only a month because she hated sushi and ate only hamburgers and grew two dress sizes. She spent a lot of her time there listening to the sad life story of another model, a woman she describes as “a street cat.” When she returned to Israel and to drama school, she used almost everything she learned from her for a similarly distraught model character in a theatrical version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.” “I used her to play that character,” Zurer recalls. “I suddenly, completely, utterly forgot myself when I was on stage. I realized (acting) is not about showing off yourself but something totally different but quite profound.”
She went on to study acting in New York before returning to Israel, where she won the 2003 Israeli equivalent of an Oscar for her performance as a woman who lost her husband in a terrorist attack in the dramedy “Nina’s Tragedies.” She later starred in the TV series “Be’Tipul,” the original Israeli version of HBO’s “In Treatment,” which was a sensation in her homeland, particularly Zurer’s story line. She played a troubled, highly sexualized young woman who believes she is in love with her therapist (the Melissa George story line in the American remake).
At 21, she went to Japan to try modeling, a stint that lasted only a month because she hated sushi and ate only hamburgers and grew two dress sizes. She spent a lot of her time there listening to the sad life story of another model, a woman she describes as “a street cat.” When she returned to Israel and to drama school, she used almost everything she learned from her for a similarly distraught model character in a theatrical version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.” “I used her to play that character,” Zurer recalls. “I suddenly, completely, utterly forgot myself when I was on stage. I realized (acting) is not about showing off yourself but something totally different but quite profound.”
She went on to study acting in New York before returning to Israel, where she won the 2003 Israeli equivalent of an Oscar for her performance as a woman who lost her husband in a terrorist attack in the dramedy “Nina’s Tragedies.” She later starred in the TV series “Be’Tipul,” the original Israeli version of HBO’s “In Treatment,” which was a sensation in her homeland, particularly Zurer’s story line. She played a troubled, highly sexualized young woman who believes she is in love with her therapist (the Melissa George story line in the American remake).
Hot Actress Ayelet ZurerZurer was a bleary-eyed new mother when she got a cryptic call out of the blue from a casting director who wanted her to come the very next day to audition on tape for a very famous American director. Exhausted, and doubtful of her ability to prepare, Zurer declined until the casting director finally revealed that the director was Spielberg and the project was “Munich.”
The controversial film tells the story of a group of Israeli agents who methodically hunt down and kill the terrorists responsible for the massacre of Israel’s 1972 Olympic team in Munich, Germany.
Her character embodies the vitality of life — a reason to go on living when the cost of what he has done begins to weigh on the hero played by Bana.
“My feeling, it was an homage to (Spielberg’s wife, actress Kate Capshaw). He truly loves her, and he wanted a woman who would be real but also supportive of her husband, not a woman who just stays behind and cries and nags him to come back,” Zurer says. “I thought she was a very happy, contented person who could survive on her own.”
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