Acclaimed French actress Mélanie Laurent, best known in the English-speaking world for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, will star in the fifth season of Fauda, yes Studios announced on Monday.
Laurent, who has won two Cesar Awards, the French Oscar equivalent, also had leading roles in Operation Finale and Now You See Me. She will join Fauda’s star, Lior Raz, whom she worked with previously in the Netflix movie 6 Underground, when Fauda’s latest season goes into production later this month. Laurent will reportedly appear in seven of the new season’s nine episodes.
As is customary with the suspenseful, plot-driven series about an Israeli counterterrorism unit, the details about her role and just about everything about the new season of Fauda are currently being kept under wraps.
It was created by Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff and was based on their experiences in the Israel Defense Forces. It originally aired in Israel a decade ago and was then shown around the world on Netflix. It has received huge ratings, even in the Arab world, and drew praise for tense plotting, fleshed-out Arab characters, and its portrayal of the workings of the Israeli counter terrorists. Stephen King tweeted, after he discovered the series on Netflix, that it was “all killer, no filler.”
The first two seasons were set in and around the West Bank, while the third season featured a storyline about hostage-taking in Gaza, which was far smaller in scale than what actually happened on October 7, 2023, but now seems prescient. The fourth season moved to Europe, where the characters fought Islamic terror cells there.
The fifth season was being planned when Hamas attacked in 2023, and Issacharoff said that following the massacre and outbreak of the war, he realized they would have to rethink the upcoming season’s plot. The Jewish Chronicle reported that he said, “Some people will be able to ignore it [the war] but we can’t, we will have to write the war in, in some way,” at an event in London in 2024. He also told The Forward that at one point the Fauda team had planned a plotline about a massacre that was similar to what took place but abandoned it because they thought it would be considered implausible. He said, “Fauda tries to be authentic and realistic. If you come up with something like that, it sounds crazy. So we gave it up. And then, Saturday morning, we saw something way, way, way worse than what we tried to imagine.”
Will Idan Amedi return to Fauda?
Idan Amedi, one of the stars of the series and a popular singer, was badly injured fighting in Gaza in early 2024. Following his recovery, he said that he wouldn’t be able to continue his recording, performing and acting career, so he would sit out the fifth season. But in 2025, the production team confirmed to Ynet that he would return in a guest role.
Amedi wasn’t the only member of the Fauda family who fought in the war. Matan Meir, a crew member on the series, was killed while fighting in the north of Gaza in 2023, when he was wounded in a booby-trapped tunnel.
The new season of Fauda will be directed by Omri Givon, who also directed season four, and written by Omri Shenhar (Tehran, Magpie). Fauda is produced by yes TV and L. Benasuly Productions for yes TV. yes Studios handles the series’ international distribution.
Fauda has won many awards, including Best Series, Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Actor at the Israeli Academy Television Awards.
The fifth season of Fauda is expected to premiere on yes TV in Israel in early 2026, followed by a worldwide launch on Netflix.