Assi Cohen

Cohen was born in Ashdod on October 10, 1974.[1] He served in the military’s Communications Corps before entering the Domino Gross comedy club at the age of 22.[5] His early stand-up performances brought him before Tel Aviv audiences, within a circle of performers that included Adir Miller, Roi Bar-Natan, Rotem Abuhab, and Guri Alfi.[5]

Cohen and Alfi formed the comedy partnership Asi and Guri, performing on stage and appearing in the television parody Shidurei HaMahapecha.[5] Their characters included David and Tikva and Koko and Steve.[1]

After the Asi and Guri partnership ended, Cohen continued independently, returning to television in Erez Tal’s Eifo Ata Chai?!, where he played Imri the healer and Koko.[1] His television work also included Rak BeYisrael, the drama Ahava Ze Koev alongside Dana Modan, and Mesudarim, in which he played Tomer.[1]

His early film appearances included Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi (2003), written and directed by Shemi Zarhin.[6] The film follows a sixteen-year-old balancing school and romance with family responsibilities, including cooking and caring for his grandfather.[6] Cohen also appeared alongside Mili Avital and Nir Levy in Shai Kannot’s Colombian Love (2004), an Israeli romantic comedy about three friends coping with adulthood and relationships.[7] His other film credits included Yossi & Jagger, Munich, and Zehu Sdom.[1][8]

Cohen joined Eretz Nehederet, the satirical sketch-comedy program that began airing on Keshet’s Channel 2 in 2003.[9] Its weekly format combines topical sketches and political satire with impersonations of political and popular-culture figures.[9] Cohen was among the participants in the three-disc DVD collection Eretz Nehederet: The Great Moments, 2004–2006, released in 2006, which brought together highlights from the first season and from 2005 and 2006, behind-the-scenes material, and outtakes.[10]

Shauli first appeared in the program’s seventh season, in a sketch about a real-estate purchasing group.[11] The part was initially conceived as a disruptive neighbor rather than a major recurring character; during filming, Cohen changed the character’s name from Herzl to Shauli and added or improvised dialogue.[11] Cohen recalled that lines emerged while he was in costume and that the character developed through work with colleagues on set.[11]

Shauli subsequently became central to HaParlament, a series that grew out of a segment on Eretz Nehederet.[5][11] The new setting expanded the character’s circle of relatives and friends, with further development involving writers including Eran Zarhovich.[11] Cohen described Shauli as a man with a life philosophy and strong opinions but little awareness of how others perceive him.[11] For a later Eretz Nehederet storyline, Cohen proposed giving Shauli cancer; the writers researched the subject and consulted a doctor while preparing the hospital sketches.[11]

In a 2012 interview, Cohen said he had left Eretz Nehederet after five years to seek greater creative freedom and pursue his own work.[8] He described the decision as gradual, acknowledged the program’s considerable contribution to his professional development, and recalled initially finding it strange to miss a season.[8] After his departure, he began developing HaParlament with Assaf Harel, Eran Zarhovich, and Maor Cohen.[8] His involvement extended beyond acting to writing and editing.[5]

Cohen recalled that the collaborators were initially unsure whether HaParlament would work or make audiences laugh, and that they chiefly amused themselves during its development.[8] The response after Keshet screened the program reassured them, and its success exceeded their expectations.[8] By 2014, Cohen was also appearing in the small-stage production Michael at Tzavta, having joined as a replacement for a pregnant performer after seeing and liking the show.[12]

Alongside his comedy, Cohen played Amiel Ben-Horin in the Israeli drama Hatufim.[8] Amiel was regarded as dead throughout the first season until a revelation in its final episode, and the second season placed greater emphasis on him.[8] Cohen initially hesitated to accept the small first-season role but agreed after creator Gideon Raff told him that he had plans for the character in the following season.[8]

The second season required Cohen to speak Arabic, for which he began lessons with a teacher in Jaffa several months before filming.[8] His preparation included studying the language and its grammatical forms, reading the full season two or three times, and then analyzing his scenes and making extensive notes.[8] In the same 2012 interview, he said that he had spent sixteen years on stage and thirteen on screen, yet remained uncertain about identifying himself as an actor: “I didn’t consider myself an actor until a few years ago, and even now I don’t know if I consider myself an actor.”[8]

Cohen said he found acting a more comfortable means of expression than interviews.[8] Describing the uncertainty of performance, he remarked that when the cameras turn on, “some kind of magic has to happen,” without the actor knowing why it occurred previously or whether it would recur.[8] He also recalled feeling reassured when he saw veteran actor Gila Almagor experiencing anxiety on the set of Munich.[8]

In Autonomies, Cohen played Yona Broyde, a Hasidic father of four who transports contraband across a wall separating an ultra-Orthodox enclave from the rest of Israel.[4] The series imagines a divided country, with a religious autonomy in Jerusalem and a secular state governed from Tel Aviv; its central conflict concerns a child mistakenly raised by a family on the other side of the divide.[4] Broyde’s work includes bringing the bodies of Jews who died outside Jerusalem into the autonomy for religious burial.[13] Although he smuggles contraband, he refuses to place pork in a coffin containing a Jewish body, establishing a moral boundary within his activities.[13]

Cohen co-created Significant Other with Dana Modan and Ram Nehari.[3] Its original two seasons aired in 2018 and 2020, following two lonely neighbors in their mid-forties who cautiously begin a romantic relationship after major events bring them together.[3] Cohen won the lead actor in a comedy series award for his performance at the Israeli Academy for Film and Television’s 2020 television awards, announced at a ceremony in April 2021.[14]

Cohen returned to cinema in Moshe Rosenthal’s Tell Me Everything, also identified as Independence and by its Hebrew title Atzmaut.[15][16] The 2026 release marked his return to the big screen more than fifteen years after Zehu Sdom, following years spent largely in television.[15][16] He played Meir, the father of Boaz, in a coming-of-age story set across 1987 and a later period.[15] Shortly before his bar mitzvah, Boaz discovers his father’s same-sex relationship during the AIDS epidemic; the story follows their estrangement and Boaz’s later search for him.[15][16]

The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2026 and was selected to open the 43rd Jerusalem Film Festival, with an outdoor screening scheduled at the Sultan’s Pool.[16] It received a record sixteen Ophir Award nominations that year and won ten awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay.[17] Cohen was nominated for his performance, although the Best Actor award went to Ehab Salami for Where To?.[17]

Shauli became one of Cohen’s best-known roles, developing from a briefly conceived disruptive neighbor into a central figure in HaParlament and a recurring character in Eretz Nehederet.[5][11] Cohen contributed to that development through improvisation, writing, and editing, as well as performance.[5][11] The renewed circulation of the civil-war sketch during the 2023 judicial-reform demonstrations gave an earlier performance a further topical audience.[2]

Cohen received Israeli Television Academy best-actor awards for Ahava Ze Koev and Mesudarim, and later won lead actor in a comedy series for Significant Other at the 2020 television awards.[8][14] His work as a co-creator of Significant Other and as an actor, writing partner, and editing participant in HaParlament also extended his contribution beyond screen performance.[3][5]

Shauli’s political satire reached a renewed audience in 2023, when a sketch first broadcast around the period of Israel’s inconclusive elections resurfaced during demonstrations against proposed judicial reforms.[2] In the sketch, the character declares: “Nothing strengthens a country more than a civil war. Every day we’re not fighting each other, it’s a waste.”[2] These words belong to Cohen’s fictional satirical character, not to a statement of Cohen’s own political position.[2] By July 2023, the clip had received nearly two million YouTube views.[2]