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Elon Gold brings laughter, Yiddish and some unexpected dance moves to movie
The comedian co-produced The Wedding Entertainer, which premieres at the UK Jewish Film Festival
It wouldn’t be a conversation about a Jewish film without a healthy dose of misery. We do sorrow exceptionally well, but it’s hard not to laugh when you’re talking to Elon Gold.
The American comedian and actor has made a career out of finding the funny side of Jewish life, and now he’s bringing that talent to Gidi Dar’s The Wedding Entertainer (The Tale of Moishe Badhan), which he also co-produced. Chosen as the UKJFF’s mid-festival gala film, it’s a very funny movie that is sad too, of course. We’re Jews. We can’t help ourselves.
Gold plays Meshulam Kalicker, a flamboyant American wedding entertainer whose arrival threatens the livelihood of Moishe, a traditional badchan played by Israeli actor Shuli Rand. The result is a wonderfully entertaining clash of personalities, generations and approaches to Jewish performance, with romance and some gloriously ridiculous dancing.
For Gold, whose television credits include Stacked opposite Pamela Anderson and Curb Your Enthusiasm with Larry David, the role demanded almost everything he had spent a lifetime learning — along with several skills he hadn’t.
“It was a combination of everything I ever sort of studied and worked on, from the acting craft to learning Yiddish. I don’t want to say singing because I’m barely a singer, and I know I’m not a dancer.”
This is a modest assessment from a man whose dance routine is one of the film’s comic highlights.
“I worked with an actual choreographer, and he was pretty much giving up and going, ‘I don’t know. What do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘Can I just do this?’ And he goes, ‘Okay, memorise it and just get it down.'”
Gold laughs at the memory. “Luckily, there were all those cutaways.”
The singing was marginally less daunting. Coming from a musical family, he knew how to carry a tune, but the combination of demands was unlike anything he’d previously attempted.
“It was really weird. Here’s a role where you’re mostly speaking Yiddish and Hebrew, which I don’t do. You’re going to sing, which I don’t do, and you’re going to dance, which I don’t do. Enjoy!”
Preparing for the part, Gold worked with a Yiddish coach over Zoom every week, mastering not just the dialogue but the pronunciation, inflections and regional differences that would make his performance convincing.
“There are different variations of Yiddish. It’s very annoying. You would think we all just have the one way to say it, but no. If you’re from Poland, you say it this way. It’s a lot.”
And then there was the physical transformation. Gold is Modern Orthodox, but Meshulam belongs to a very different Jewish world, complete with traditional dress and payot.
“I’m so not that guy,” he says. “Every morning I got peyot glued to my sides. They pasted them on, and every night they would rip them off. It was like you’ve been waxed. It’s not fun, I’ll tell you that.”
Yet the effort was worthwhile because, for Gold, the challenge was to inhabit a character rather than simply turn up and be funny.
“It was really about becoming that dude.”
What makes The Wedding Entertainer particularly appealing is that beneath the comedy lies a story about disappointment, reinvention and finding happiness when life has not gone according to plan.
It’s also a film with an unusually broad appeal. It’s for young couples contemplating marriage and older audiences with the fear of being left behind. There is something for everyone.
Gold has already tested its cross-generational appeal on his own family.
“My kids loved it, which I couldn’t believe,” he says, referring to his children, whose ages range from their late teens to their twenties, including a married daughter.
“That enthusiasm is encouraging as it’s a film rooted in a very particular Jewish tradition but with emotions that require no translation.”
And, unusually for Jewish cinema, there is the promise of happiness.
“Thank God, at the end it’s happy,” says Gold and I concur, as bouncy endings are hardly our speciality. “We specialise in misery,” he agrees. And we both laugh.
The Wedding Entertainer (The Tale of Moishe Badhan) is the Centrepiece Gala at the UK Jewish Film Festival on 12 November. Tickets at ukjewishfilm.org
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