Not since I watched Catch Me If You Can have I been so attracted to a con (wo)man, but Maddie from Imposters has me hook, line, and sinker. She’s funny, smart, sexy, conniving, and has the best wig collection that Bravo has seen since Kim Zolciak-Biermann joined the network. To be a chameleon like Maddie, you have to be quite the actor — who plays Maddie aka Ava on Imposters?
Her name is Inbar Lavi, and acting is her game. According to her IMDB page, the Israeli actress got her big television break starring in the show Underemployed as Raviva. From then, she moved onto roles in shows like Gang Related, Sons of Anarchy, Castle, The Last Ship, and the upcoming Prison Break: Sequel series. All of Lavi’s characters are very different, so it makes sense that she’d be able to take a bite out of playing someone like Maddie. Playing a woman with multiple personas is like being on five shows at once, I’m sure, and Lavi seems up to the challenge. I’m also pretty amazed that Lavi looks so good in so many hair colors — she goes from blond to black to brown on Imposters, and she looks great in every single style and hue. A natural dirty blonde, I look like a ghost if I go too dark and like a ghost if I go too light. Being that flexible in your hair choices is an acting job in itself.
Speaking of her hair, Lavi recently told TODAY that she wasn’t even sure that she could pull off her many looks on the show. “I come from Israel, where most of the population is dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark-eyed," she said. "It's really exotic to see anyone with blond hair and light eyes, so to me, it was just incredible. I never thought I would be able to pull that look off."
According to an interview she did with Huffington Post, Lavi got into acting because of a childhood disease — asthma. She was so burdened with asthma as a child that she used to have to take her nebulizer for hours, and when she would do so, she would watch movies. Voila — an actress was born, and sometimes, the line between work and real life blurs itself. Of playing Maddie, Lavi told HuffPo:
“I relate to a lot of things about Maddie, her passion for her work and her enthusiasm. She’s also very fun loving and I can relate to struggling with her line of business. It’s very similar to what I do in the sense that I put on a mask every day and pretend to be different characters for a living. Once you do that for a while, you lose a bit of yourself in the journey. I turned 30 this year and there are a lot of inner conflicts that go on... I’ve always been sort of a gypsy in my travels and all of a sudden I’m craving normality and having an anchor. These are things that drew me more so than ever before so I can appreciate many things in the journeys that Maddie goes through."
From the looks of the first season’s trailer, Maddie is about to go through (and put people through) plenty of things on Imposters. Luckily, Lavi seems up to the challenge.
