‘It’s not that I’m feeling sorry for myself, but I don’t think there’s any other profession in the world that I can think of where failure is the default,’ said television creator Ron Leshem, whose credits include such mega-hits as Euphoria and Bad Boy.
It was an odd way for the phenomenally successful Israeli-American writer/producer/novelist to start his first in-depth interview in about 15 years, but it became clear as we spoke that Leshem is both self-deprecating and very funny. He talked about having to get used to “hearing 10 no’s a day” in the television business, explaining, “Even after you get a development deal from a network, there’s still only a one-out-of-60 chance that your series will be made.”
But while he has faced rejection, he’s had more than his share of hits. He is an executive producer of both the original Israeli and HBO versions of the phenomenally successful Euphoria, the third season of which is currently in production. Bad Boy, which he created with Hagar Ben Asher for Tedy Productions and SIPUR, was shown in Israel on Hot and quickly hit the top 10 in 47 countries around the world when it was released on Netflix earlier this year. The series also won nine awards from the Israeli Television Academy, Israel’s equivalent of the Emmys, including Best Drama.
Other series Leshem has written and produced – with various collaborators – include Trust No One, Valley of Tears, Red Skies, and The Gordin Cell, all of which are stories of war and espionage, but more on that later. He’s currently involved in producing and writing series that are set all over the world and are in the early stages of development.
He has written several novels that have received great acclaim, among them Beaufort, which won the Sapir Prize in 2005 and was translated into more than 20 languages. He teamed up with director Joseph Cedar on the screenplay for the film of the same name, which was nominated for an Oscar.
Leshem, who is based in Boston and who regularly travels to Los Angeles for work, is especially pleased about how audiences around the world are responding to Bad Boy, a portrait of an incarcerated juvenile delinquent who becomes a stand-up comedian. “This was really my passion project,” he said. “It’s been embraced totally, all over the world.” He noted that this was the first Israeli series to get a red-carpet premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, in 2023.
Leshem’s journalism career inspired his TV work
It was partly inspired by Leshem’s early work as a journalist, when he had himself locked up in a juvenile detention center for a feature about how babies born in prison often end up serving time themselves by age 16. He learned a few years ago that a boy he was with there changed his name to Daniel Chen and became a stand-up comedian but never mentioned that he was behind bars from age 12 to 18 in his comedy act. “He was hiding his history,” the author/filmmaker said.
Leshem managed to track down videos of Chen from his days in a prison drama class. “There he was, 12 years old and so funny, but also trying to check what works, what makes everyone laugh,” he said. He contacted the comedian, who told him that now that he was often on television, “kids who were in jail with him are suddenly calling him up.” That sparked an idea for Leshem, “to do a show about the soul of a comedian, who uses humor as a survival tool in jail.”
He encouraged Chen to perform some new material about his difficult teen years in prison. “We kind of told him, ‘You will never be really the greatest comedian until you start talking about your own truth,’” he said. Chen’s new stand-up routines about his years behind bars are incorporated into the series very effectively, and Guy Manster gives a brilliant performance as the comedian as a teenager.
Chen was originally locked up because his mother couldn’t handle ADHD-fueled outbursts, which also interested Leshem. “I have a deep obsession with the relationship between mothers and sons,” he said, although his own upbringing couldn’t be more different from Chen’s. But he noted that he has always tried to please his mother, a lawyer who recently retired. He grew up in Givatayim; his father, who passed away last year, was the CEO of a medical institute.
He initially enrolled in law school but left after a year to pursue successful careers in journalism and as an executive at Keshet, overseeing the development of such shows as Prisoners of War, which was adapted in the US as Homeland. But it was with the success of his novel Beaufort that, “For the first time, I really saw in my mother’s eyes that she’s proud.”
While he has made series on diverse subjects, he was initially typecast in the entertainment industry because of his connection to Beaufort and Homeland.
“I would walk into a room and [executives] would say, ‘So what’s the next espionage show, what’s the next war story?’ I was dreaming of doing a show inspired by Trainspotting and Gus van Sant and [the Larry Clark movie] Kids and the French film, La Haine,” he said, all hard-hitting stories about alienated youth. “But they said, ‘You’re not this guy, you’re a nerdy dude and you’re an espionage dude.’”
He had to fight to get, Euphoria, the dark Israeli series about high-school students he co-created, to be adapted in the US – which is ironic, because it became one of that network’s biggest hits in the past decade, second only to Game of Thrones.
For years, he was “knocking on every single door and all the networks said ‘no,’ including HBO.” He took some comfort when Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner told him that it took 13 years for him to get that series produced.
Leshem’s persistence paid off and HBO eventually agreed to make the series. Euphoria, which looks at the lives of high-school students and doesn’t shy away from the reality of sex, drug use, and perhaps most memorably, mental-health issues, has won critical acclaim and become an audience favorite.
“Teenagers aren’t just binging it, they’re watching it when it’s on at 9 p.m. on Sunday night,” he said. It has won nine Emmys, two of which have gone to its lead actress, Zendaya, who has become a major movie star, appearing in Challengers and Dune.
“Zendaya has this power. When she’s on set, she projects her energy onto 300 people; everything calms down. She’s incredibly brilliant, a true drama creator at heart,” he said. “I’ve been on sets in 20 countries, and I can honestly say that the Euphoria set right now has the best atmosphere I’ve ever encountered. It’s a combination of Sam Levinson, who’s a genius filmmaker and the most generous soul, and Ashley Levinson, who is the smartest producer in Hollywood – she’s achieving something unlike any other series being filmed in recent years.”
Leshem tries to balance his frenetic workload with a normal home life. His partner of 24 years is a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital and they have two children, a 3-year-old daughter and a son who was born just a month ago. Describing himself as a pessimist, he said that when his daughter was born, his aunt, to whom he was close, told him, “You are a father now – you have to start working on your optimism. It’s a muscle; you have to practice being optimistic.”
Those words came back to haunt him when his aunt, Orit Svirsky, and his uncle, Rafi Svirsky, were murdered in their homes in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, 2023. His cousin, Itai Svirsky, was taken hostage by Hamas and executed after 99 days in captivity.
He recalls that he countered her optimism at the time by quoting the iconic director Billy Wilder, a German-Jewish refugee. “He was one of those Jews to escape Germany because he sensed what was going to happen and he lived in Beverly Hills while the war was still going on,” said Leshem. He sent her Wilder’s famous quote, “The optimists died in the gas chambers, the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.”
“Since I was a kid, this quote was always my excuse for being pessimist,” he said, “and then when she was murdered, I kept on eating myself for this… It feels like I criticized her way of life of living.”
Taking stock of his own life, Leshem realized that his aunt did get through to him: “I already feel that the one thing I’ll be most proud of in my life is that I’m a father. I really feel like I’m so proud.”
Acknowledging his aunt’s influence, he said that despite her death, “I’m pessimistic but I’m super hopeful.” That may be contradictory, but it was a good line to end our talk, and he went off to write and oversee his projects all over the world, hoping that each will be the one in 60 that will make it to the screen.