By: Ellen Cans
Famed director, Quentin Tarantino, has been living a low-key life in sunny Tel Aviv for three years now. While this might have seemed to many as an unusual detour, it may just be the two-time Oscar winner’s happily ever after.
As reported by the NY Post, Tarantino and his wife, Daniella Pick, have been living it up and hiding in plain sight in the beautiful Mediterranean city. In early July, the couple welcomed their second child at the obstetrics ward of Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital. The couple enjoyed a good amount of privacy with other new mothers on the floor being clueless to their presence there. “I heard he was there from our midwife but never saw Tarantino,” said Carnie, an actress who delivered her daughter at the same time at the Ichilov hospital.
Famous for directing “Pulp Fiction” and “Kill Bill”, the 59-year-old former actor and author got engaged in 2017 to Israeli singer Daniella Pick, 38, daughter of iconic pop musician Zvika Pick, and a celebrity in her own right. They were married in November 2018 in Beverly Hills, CA. Initially, the couple traveled back and forth between their residence in Israel and Los Angeles, CA. As of 2020, when the pandemic-led-lockdowns began, the couple made their main residence in a Ramat Aviv Gimel neighborhood of Tel Aviv. In February 2020, the couple welcomed their first son, Leo –who was also born in Israel. Their second child, a daughter, was born this July.
The couple owns a six-bedroom, 2,900-square-foot villa on Elkakhi Street in Ramat Aviv Gimmel, a quiet neighborhood in northern Tel Aviv. The director also still owns an apartment in New York City and in Los Angeles. Tarantino has already experienced the worse part of living in Israel—the armed conflict between Hamas and Israel, but has stayed put. “My Israeli friends tell me, ‘After the rockets, now you can officially call yourself an Israeli,’” Tarantino told Yediot Aharonot newspaper in a 2021 interview. “I love the country, and the people are really nice, very nice to me, and they seem excited that I’m here,” Tarantino had said in a different 2020 interview with Yediot Aharonot. He told Bill Maher in a 2021 interview that Tel Aviv is like a smaller version of LA with “magnificent restaurants, cool bars, cool clubs.”
At the beginning of his stay in the country, his Israeli neighbors said they never actually saw him. “I never saw him or heard from him,” said Orit Bezalel, who lived two houses away, and whose son is an aspiring film maker anxious to meet the influential legend. Since then, though, there has been a change in Tarantino. He is now often seen jogging, walking or biking in Park Hayarkon. He’s a regular local dad, seen taking his son to the playground or a toddler’s birthday party. Tarantino is also a regular at the movies—particularly the Cinema City Glilot theater complex just north of Tel Aviv.
In June, he accepted an honorary doctorate from Jerusalem’s prestigious Hebrew University, honoring his career and his new life in the Jewish nation. Tarantino has even played with the idea of making a movie in Israel. “If you make a movie in Jerusalem, there’s nowhere you can point the camera where you’re not capturing something fantastic,” he told Maher. He added, “I wouldn’t make a movie about the political climate [in Israel].”