Avihu Pinhasov: "They are always trying to get me off my craziness. People were afraid to work with me"
He loves the edges. Whether it's dancing in sequined underwear at an army base on Mount Hermon, starring in 'Happy Place' without reading the script or watching the series, or his current madness: a diet for a new and extreme performance even by his standards. Moments before Avihu Pinhasov takes the stage with 'Kakamayka', a show that will include a sword fight and Georgian ballet, he tells how out of the blows he received in his childhood and the producers who refused to work with him, an extraordinary and larger-than-life character was born.
To the restaurant in Jaffa where we arranged to meet for the interview, Avihu Pinhasov arrived in a collector's car with leather seats and an open roof. Together with the cowboy hat he insists on wearing and the golden tooth that sparkles from afar, he looks exactly like his famous stage persona, the one that made him one of the strangest and most special birds in our cultural landscape. The extravagant look is not a costume he puts on only during a performance. From his point of view, there is no separation between Avihu Pinhasov the artist and Avihu Landwer the person. All the accessories are part of the world he has been building around himself since he was a child.
"That's how I live," he declares, "Every time it's a different season, a different world. I live in my own movie." And inside his own movie, he has no problem moving quickly between humor and seriousness. He opens our conversation with a joke about grandmothers with gold teeth and very quickly changes his tone when he talks about the loss he experienced. His mother passed away about 15 years ago, his father a little over a year ago, and his grandmother a few months ago. "Only I remained," he says.
Between jokes and pain, he also managed to undergo a significant change in the recent period. The singer who sings enthusiastically in the song "Self-Empowerment Workshop", "Look at me, how tall I am, how fat I am", shed 17 kg for the sake of his new and complex show, "Kakamayka", and settles for muesli for breakfast. "Usually I eat lamb fat in the morning, but I have a very difficult show now," he says, "Don't you see on me that I train a lot? I need to be in shape. I did lose weight, but for the role in 'Happy Place' I gained about 7 kilos. It's not that I was skinny before. Now I eat only protein, I cut out the laffas, all the shishliks I love, the shawarma, everything I love, even the cakes. I breathe better, climb and go up into the air. But let's see what happens, maybe a month after the show, I'll gain 40 kilos. I don't like to restrain myself."
