Fauda Star Lior Raz is Absolutely Brilliant in New Hollywood Thriller "Tuner"

Beloved Fauda star Lior Raz is trading Jenin for jazz clubs and the results might just be oscar-worthy.

There's a moment in every great actor's career where they shed the role that made them famous and remind you they were never just one thing. For Lior Raz, the brawling, brooding co-creator and star of Netflix's Fauda, that moment arrives this month, when the former special forces operative turned television phenomenon steps onto the biggest stage of his career in Tuner, a sleek, cerebral heist thriller that is already generating serious awards-season whispers.

The Concept That Stopped Hollywood in Its Tracks

Directed by Daniel Roher, the documentarian who took home the Oscar for Navalny and is now making his narrative feature debut, Tuner is built around one of the more quietly brilliant premises to come out of Hollywood in years. Leo Woodall, the British heartthrob who had audiences completely undone in The White Lotus, plays Niki White, a classical pianist whose career has collapsed but whose ears remain extraordinary. We're talking perfect-pitch-on-steroids extraordinary, the kind of hearing that can detect the faint mechanical click of a high-security safe mid-rotation.

It's a gift that was destroying him. Until someone figured out how to weaponize it.

Enter Lior Raz

That someone is Uri, the role Raz was perhaps always destined to play. A security consultant with a murky moral ledger and an eye for exploitable talent, Uri spots in Niki something the rest of the world dismissed as a psychiatric quirk, and sets about pulling him into a world of high-stakes safecracking with the kind of quiet, coiled charm that Raz has perfected over years of playing men you should never fully trust.

This is not a cameo. This is not a supporting turn. By all accounts, Raz commands the screen as a complex, watchful force, less outright villain, more the most dangerous kind of antagonist: the one who genuinely believes he's doing you a favour.

He's joined by fellow Israeli talents Gil Cohen and Nissan Sakira, making Tuner a quietly significant moment for Israeli cinema on the global stage.

The Cast That Makes It Electric

If the premise is the hook, the ensemble is what sets Tuner apart. Woodall brings the same wounded intensity that made him a breakout name, this time channeling it into a man whose greatest gift has become his greatest liability. Havana Rose Liu plays Ruthie, a composition student whose presence in Niki's life gives the film its emotional ballast and its moral stakes, she is, in every sense, his conscience made flesh.

And then there is Dustin Hoffman.

The two-time Oscar winner takes on Harry Horowitz, an old-school piano master and mentor figure whose relationship with Niki gives the film unexpected warmth. The casting is also, the film gleefully acknowledges, a joke, Tuner apparently includes a scene in which someone compares Niki's abilities to those of Rain Man. Given that his mentor is played by Dustin Hoffman, this lands less as Easter egg and more as full-on wink to the audience.

Roher's move from documentary to fiction is the subplot that the industry can't stop talking about. The precision and tension that made Navalny so gripping, that sense of watching something real unspool in real time, appears to have translated directly into a thriller that festival audiences have reportedly found almost unbearably taut.

Tuner had its world premiere at Telluride and has since made a strong run through the festival circuit. It hits theaters later this month.

If you've been waiting for the film that finally breaks Lior Raz wide open for international audiences, your wait is almost over. This one's in tune.