Moran Atias: ‘Since October 7, being Israeli in Hollywood has come at a price’

“She said, ‘I want a father,’” Atias recalls. “I took a breath and asked her, ‘Why do you want a father?’ She answered, ‘Because I want to play with him.’ I told her, ‘Okay, but you can play with Grandpa Mordy, with Uncle Stephen,’ and that was it. It ended there.”

Has she already asked why she does not have a father, or who her father is?
“Not yet, but I’m preparing myself for it,” Atias says. “I know I’ll want to choose the right words, because words have so much power. On the other hand, it doesn’t stress me out. Let’s put it this way: I’m not going to invent storks. It’s important to me that she understand that I chose her, and that I did everything to become her mother.”

Atias has spoken often about her journey into single motherhood, which also became a central part of her widely discussed TED talk. But amid the story of her decision to have a child on her own, she also revealed something darker: the destructive relationship she had with herself for years, one that only recently, and especially since her daughter Lia was born, has begun to change.

Atias says she went through harmful experiences both after arriving in Hollywood and in toxic relationships, “the kind where I would stand in front of my partner and be unable to answer him,” she says. “Silent as a fish.”

Only through therapy, she says, did she understand that the little girl who had been hurt was still inside her, and that healing meant learning how to speak to that girl and tell her she was wonderful exactly as she was.

As part of her effort to change unhealthy patterns, Atias has also deepened her practice of meditation this year.

“I started 2026 at a Joe Dispenza retreat,” she says. “I saw pictures with a sunset and a beach and thought: wow, lying around, cocktails and a little meditation. In the end, I arrived at a marathon that starts at 5 a.m. and ends at 11 p.m. in a windowless hall. By the end of the fifth day, my body was convulsing. But it also released so many years of trauma, and then the questions came up: what do I want, and what am I asking for myself?”

Last year, Atias checked off another item on her list when she acted for the first time alongside her younger sister Shani, who also moved to Los Angeles and built an acting career.

It happened in Amazon Prime’s biblical series “Joseph of Egypt,” which, according to reports, is expected to air next year. Shani played Rachel, while Moran played her maidservant Bilhah. Beyond the joy of acting with her sister, Atias says she especially loved playing, for the first time in her Hollywood career, a Jewish character.

Atias has always felt connected to Judaism and Israel, but since October 7, that connection has intensified. After years of not wearing Jewish symbols, she now wears a large chai necklace. She also speaks out and fights publicly for Israel, creates activist content for social media and hopes to continue playing Jewish characters.

“There are very few roles like that in Hollywood today,” she says. “‘Boycott’ may be a hard word to use, but it is definitely close to reality. I feel my purpose is to bring Jewish characters and values to the screen, and that I am also the one who has to create that reality.”

That is why, alongside other projects she is developing, she is now writing a series based on her own life, focusing on the period in which she decided to have a child on her own. She says her story has helped “hundreds of men and women, if not thousands, choose themselves,” and she hopes the series will continue to inspire others.

“The first episode takes place around the Shabbat table,” she says. “I tell my father I want to have a child through sperm donation, and he says he needs to consult the rabbi.”

Will it be a drama series?
“More of a comedy,” she says. “Although at that moment, when I was living through that choice, it was a Greek tragedy for me. I felt I was disappointing the narrative we all grew up on. The prince won’t come, no one will save me, there will be no wedding, no wedding dress, no chuppah, no rabbi. Only a frozen sperm cell. But today, when I look back, the dissonance makes me laugh. How my greatest shame became my greatest pride.”

The interview with Atias takes place on a Sunday morning over Zoom from her apartment in Los Angeles. Half an hour in, sweet little Lia wakes up and comes over to the screen to say hello.

Lia, who was born in Israel, now attends a Montessori preschool with a Jewish Mexican teacher. Throughout the interview, the toddler speaks to her mother in English with an American accent, while Atias answers her in a mix of English and Hebrew.

“When I came back to Los Angeles with her, she mostly spoke Hebrew, but now she has a strong command of both languages and even knows a little Italian because her babysitter is Italian,” Atias says.

“On one hand, Lia is very calm and can keep herself busy for hours. On the other, she is also super emotional. Let’s put it this way: it definitely seems the Moroccan gene took over her too. But I actually love that. In so many ways, she is exactly like me, but there are also things I know for certain she didn’t get from me. For example, she is very acrobatic and loves gymnastics. All day long she does cartwheels and splits. That definitely did not come from me or from my parents.”

During the coronavirus pandemic, before she became pregnant, Atias returned to Israel and was sure she would not leave again. But her life took another turn, and two years ago she returned to the Hollywood capital.

Atias, who does not hesitate to say she also auditioned for the previous season of “Fauda” and was not cast, “and that’s completely fine,” says the main consideration was professional.

“The number of projects in Israel is very small,” she says. “In the best case, I would have one audition every eight months for a role that interested me. The range of roles is also limited. The straw that broke the camel’s back was an audition I did in Israel for a role in a series. The producer called and said, ‘Moran, there is no question here. You are an incredible actress. I most want to cast you, but unfortunately the channel wants another girl.’ The problem, from my perspective, was that ‘the other girl’ wasn’t even in the category of actress.”

That, she says, made her understand that casting choices in Israel were not necessarily based on “may the best person win.”

“In America, I feel my career rewards me for my talent,” she says. “In Israel, the choices are sometimes driven by other interests, which I can’t and don’t want to compete with. I’m certainly not going to enter the reality TV circuit or the gossip circuit now just to be in some place of likes.”

Do you think being so identified with Israel has hurt your Hollywood career? Since October 7, are you being offered fewer roles?
“I don’t think, I know,” she says. “I’ll tell you something else: there is a huge conference I was invited to speak at during the Cannes Film Festival, 150 leading women from all kinds of fields. Not long ago they called to tell me they couldn’t pay for my flights, because the airline sponsoring it is from Dubai and they are not willing to fly an Israeli.”

Don’t we have a peace agreement with them?
“That’s what I thought too,” she says. “And still, that’s the situation. In the end, I decided to pay for the flights myself. So yes, it costs me financially, and certainly emotionally too. But as far as I’m concerned, representing Israel in the world is a supreme value.”

Alongside her sense of mission and public advocacy, Atias does not hide the fact that returning to Los Angeles as a single mother has also brought fears and difficulties.

“A few days ago, I started feeling unwell and immediately panicked,” she says. “I thought: If I’m sick now, who picks Lia up? Who takes care of her? It’s true, I have a support system here too. Aunt Deborah, my mother’s sister, and her husband Stephen are crazy about Lia. They live two hours from Los Angeles, and when I need to leave the city for a few days, they come to watch her. My sister Shani lives with her family 20 minutes from me. But it’s still not like in Israel, when I knew my parents were nearby and could come at a moment’s notice.”

After returning to LA, Atias decided to leave the large home she loved in the Hollywood Hills.

“I bought the house 15 years ago through hard work,” she says. “I renovated it and turned it into an amazing home: two floors, five bedrooms, a garden, a pool, although between us, I went into that pool maybe three times in all the years I lived there,” she adds with a laugh.

“But what happened is that after October 7, I was afraid to live there alone with Lia. I preferred to move to an apartment in a building with a guard. And there is also the financial issue. It’s not simple when you have a child and you are the sole provider, especially at a time when the industry is still in a delicate state and people don’t always feel comfortable taking you for one role or another. Suddenly I understood that the house could become an income-producing business. I bought a two-bedroom apartment where Lia and I can manage perfectly well, and for now I can rent out the house and receive steady income from it.”

That is also one of the reasons why, although she wants to have another sister for Lia, and has said in the past that she has another frozen embryo, she does not plan to do so in the near future.

“There is also a significant financial aspect to it,” she says. “When you are the sole provider, and in a very unstable industry, you have to feel stable. Today I am doing very intensive, daily work to get to that place.”