Rotem Sela

Rotem Sela-Rotter (רותם סלע-רוטר; Sela) is an Israeli model, television presenter, and actress; best known for starring as Noa Hollander on the Israeli television series Beauty and the Baker (2013–2021).

Early life
Rotem Sela (רותם סלע) was born and raised in Kiryat Haim, Haifa, Israel to Liora and Avraham Sela. She is of Polish-Jewish descent and Turkish-Jewish descent. She is the youngest daughter and her elder sister is Tal Sela. Sela's family and she moved to the affluent city of Caesarea, Israel, when Sela was 17. Her common Hebrew first name is a derivative of the biblical flowering bush Retama, while her surname means "a rock" in Hebrew.

She was enlisted to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), serving as a clerk for the Israeli Navy headquarters at HaKirya base.

She graduated in 2011 with a degree in law and business administration from the IDC Herzliya college in Herzliya, Israel, and subsequently passed the bar.

Career
Sela has said that she prioritises having a career in Israel instead of pursuing opportunities elsewhere; “Tel Aviv cannot be replaced by any city in the world. It’s always surprising to people, but it’s really not my dream to succeed in America, I want to succeed here, to work here, to do Israeli work … it was important to me to stay here.”

In 2013 she was cast as the female lead in Beauty and the Baker alongside Alush after Bar Refaeli exited the role. Sela plays Noa Hollander a privileged Ashkenazi model and heiress that falls in love with a working-class Yemenite baker Amos Dahari (Alush). The series was positively reviewed by Haaretz newspaper. In 2017 Amazon acquired global rights of the first two seasons of the show to stream them worldwide on Amazon Prime Video.

In 2018 she was cast as a series regular in The Psychologist, an Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation show that follows a similar format to the Lisa Kudrow series, Web Therapy. In the same year Sela appeared alongside Assi Cohen as a Haredi housewife in Autonomies. Autonomies is a dystopian drama about an Israel divided into two entities; the Haredi Autonomy in Jerusalem and a secular State of Israel in Tel Aviv.

In 2023 she starred alongside Yehuda Levi in A Body That Works, a surrogacy drama series on Keshet 12. The series was a major success in Israel, and was the highest rated drama of 2023 in the country. Sela won the Best Actress award for an international series at Series Mania in France. It was released internationally by Netflix.

In 2024 Sela stars alongside Lior Raz and Zohar Strauss in the Israeli drama, Soda by Erez Tadmor. It is based on the story of Tadmor's grandfather, a Jewish partisan during the Second World War and his subsequent post-war life in Israel.

Additional work
As a model she currently fronts the Castro campaigns alongside Aviv Alush.

Personal life
In 2010 she married Israeli businessman Ariel Rotter, with whom she has three children.

Sela became a vegetarian in 2007 and then began to approach veganism as well. In an interview with the Pnai Plus newspaper in November 2015, she defined herself as "90% vegan". In 2014, she participated in a broadcast by the Vegan Friendly organization, which opposes the harm to cows in the dairy industry and calls for avoiding the consumption of dairy products.

In March 2019, Sela criticized Israel's Ministry of Culture and Sport, Mrs. Miri Regev, due to the latter's reaction to the Arab political parties at the Knesset of Israel. Sela subsequently shared her political views online and where she condemns Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's actions, and then Netanyahu responded directly back to Sela's post and brought to her attention the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Sela was publicly supported at the time by several local figures, including her fellow Israeli actress Gal Gadot, model Shlomit Malka, and Arab-Israeli newscaster Lucy Aharish.

Sela has supported LGBT rights, telling ynet in 2015 that "I would give Nora Grinberg a torch, she's among the first [openly] transgender people in Israel, and it's very important that gays, lesbians and transgenders get a stage." And when asked whether the movement had become too extreme she replied that "The situation before the #MeToo movement was extreme, this world in which men allowed themselves to talk and behave to women in an uninhibited way. The campaign is very important, and even if at the moment it feels to some people too extreme, it is okay and eventually the middle will be found."