Actor and director Adam Gabay, 28, says he is at home in Tel Aviv after recently moving with his wife, Elza, from the first floor to the fifth floor in the same building. In a wide-ranging interview, he describes a structured Friday routine, his close ties to his wife and friends, and his dislike of coffee, which he traces to a childhood sip of his father’s black coffee with cardamom.
Gabay is currently promoting several projects. On June 28, the play “Sof Shavua beKreta” will open at the Dimona Theater, where he plays the grandson in a family story spanning three generations and a 80th-birthday trip to Crete, revealing secrets, old scores, trauma and questions about masculinity and generational gaps. At the end of the month, the film “Makolet,” a Jerusalem coming-of-age story by Yuval Shani, will be released; Gabay says the cast won the ensemble prize at the Jerusalem Film Festival. He also co-hosts the radio show “Tov She’Batem” on Galgalatz with Shlomit Shtrouman and Merav Feldman, and works closely with singer Nunu as her artistic director.
He says his biggest personal achievement is his marriage to Elza, and his biggest professional one remains “HaNoarim,” the HBO series by Hagai Levi, Yosef Cedar and Tawfik Abu Wael, which he filmed at age 20 before completing military service. He says his most important trait is hard work, and that his greatest fear is AI, which he worries could replace people in creative professions and “dull” human thinking.
Gabay also remembers his late childhood friend Omri Belkin, killed on October 7 after serving in Lotar and rescuing about 30 families in Be’eri. He says he misses his grandmother Ruta, who died when he was 3, and calls her a cool, music-loving early female motorcyclist in Tel Aviv. He says he would most like to have a time machine, to visit the music scenes of the 1960s and 1970s, and he would rather be “more of a business man,” because bureaucracy, investments and forms intimidate him.
