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Actors Who Filmed in Ukraine

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Photo: Filming in Ukraine was more profitable for Europeans. Source: Collage the Gaze/Leonid Lukashenko.
Photo: Filming in Ukraine was more profitable for Europeans. Source: Collage the Gaze/Leonid Lukashenko.

Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv often "played the role" of Moscow on film screens - filming in Ukraine was more profitable not only for Russian filmmakers, but also for European ones. In the end, Western audiences do not always realise, for example, that the Kyiv City Hall was used as the Soviet secret police building in the film The Death of Stalin. The latest example is the Indian blockbuster RRR: Rise Roar Revolt, which competed for the Oscars in 2013. In the finale, the main characters danced in front of the Mariinsky Palace, the ceremonial residence of the President of Ukraine and one of Kyiv's tourist gems. These scenes were filmed during the last peaceful summer in Ukraine.

There are many myths and legends surrounding the filming of famous films in Ukrainian locations. For example, in Odesa, there are tours of the locations where The Legend of the Pianist and The Carrier-3 were filmed - you can even be shown room 203 in the Londonsky Hotel, where Quentin Tarantino's favourite actor Tim Roth supposedly lived. But neither Roth nor The Carrier star Jason Statham was in Odesa. All the scenes with Roth were filmed in Italy in a pavilion, and instead of Statham, his stunt double took part in the Ukrainian scenes. But it happened that the film stars filmed in familiar locations in Kyiv, Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities.

Malcolm McDowell, Evilenko (2004)


In the summer of 2003, on the central streets of Kyiv, one could meet a grey-haired imposing old man who seemed familiar to middle-aged passers-by. When the man caught the eye of a stranger, he would smile and wink slyly. The star of Stanley Kubrick's famous film A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell, was known in the late USSR for his film Caligula. The scandalous film was watched on a pirated video, which could lead to a criminal sentence under the article on the distribution of pornography. Although this gave Malcolm McDowell's post-Soviet fame an ambiguous connotation, the actor was undoubtedly perceived as one of the board's "own".

By the way, in 2024, Caligula, remade without pornographic scenes, as it was originally intended, was released again and became one of the main film events of the last year.

"Evilenko is a depressing Italian thriller about a paedophile maniac whose prototype was the notorious Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. Malcolm McDowell, an actor of negative charm, brilliantly played the demonic maniacal hypnotist: frightening and pathetic at the same time. The film itself, unlike most Western films about the Soviet Union, is attentive to detail (although there is a funny mistake by director David Grieco - a bearded policeman, which was not in accordance with the statute). The atmosphere of the late USSR was created by real locations in Kyiv: the recently reconstructed building of the central station, the World War II museum with its monument to the Motherland, secondary school No. 110, where the film maniac worked as a teacher, real Kyiv streets, etc.

Emir Kusturica, Guillaume Canet, Farewell (2009)


In the contemporary film community, Serbian director, screenwriter, actor and musician Emir Kusturica is more of an outcast than a cultural hero. In the nineties, he was called the director of the future: his film about the war in the Balkans, Underground, was both declared a masterpiece and caused a political scandal. Kusturica was also one of the few filmmakers whose films twice won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Today, he is notorious mostly as a pro-Russian propagandist who supported the invasion of Ukraine.

Since the noughties, Kusturica has been acting more than directing. He was nominated for the prestigious César Award for his first acting work in the film The Widow of Saint Pierre. In the spy detective film Farewell, which was filmed in Kyiv, Kusturica plays a high-ranking KGB officer who passed Soviet secrets to the West. Today, this film holds attention mainly because of Kusturica's textured performance: the real lieutenant colonel Vladimir Vetrov was a much less likeable person. But his betrayal caused so much damage to the Soviet secret services that even 25 years later, the Russian Ministry of Culture refused to cooperate with French filmmakers. They had to film Moscow in Kyiv.     

Thus, Guillaume Canet, the star of the films The Beach and The View, meets Kusturica's character for the first time at the Zoloti Vorota metro station in Kyiv. The spies then hold secret meetings near the seventh pavilion of VDNKh, in the park of the World War II Museum (where Evilenko was previously filmed), and on a bench near the Yanovsky Institute of Phthisiology and Pulmonology. The filmmakers pass off its buildings as the Moscow State University.


James Norton, Vanessa Kirby, The Price of Truth (2019)


A historical film by the famous Polish director Agnieszka Holland (known, among other things, for the TV series House of Cards) tells the story of British journalist Garrett Jones. He was a real historical figure. Among other things, he was the first to transmit information to the Western media about the Holodomor of the 1930s, an artificially created famine in Soviet Ukraine. To do so, he had to do the impossible as a foreigner under total police control: he had to travel to Ukrainian villages to collect footage.    

The film became a major event in Ukraine and received favourable press from professional media in Europe and the US. James Norton, the star of the TV series MacMafia and War and Peace, as always, created the image of a handsome and fearless idealist on the screen. Ready to do anything for a sensational story, he descends into the real hell of villages dying of starvation and becomes obsessed with bringing the truth to the rest of the world.

Since it is impossible to make an anti-Stalinist film in modern Russia, the audience sees Ukrainian locations instead of Moscow. For example, the snow-covered streets of Moscow were filmed in Kharkiv, where the central part of the city had to be blocked off for the shoot. But the character Vanessa Kirby (star of the TV series The Crown) had to go up to her Moscow apartment in Kyiv, on Bulvarno-Kudriavska Street. The filming also took place near the Central Bus Station in Kyiv, where the filmmakers recreated the surroundings of the thirties with old houses and a factory. The scenes of the journalist's journey were filmed in Chernihiv and Zhytomyr regions.

John Turturro, The Truce (1997)


In the late autumn of 1996, when the film The Truce was being shot in Ukraine, the Coen brothers' favourite actor John Turturro had already starred in the cult films Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski, but the star-studded Transformers was still to come, so no one recognised the actor on the streets. Instead, the Ukrainian film crew remembered him as a polite and open person.

The last film by Francesco Rosi, a classic of seventies Italian cinema, is an adaptation of Primo Levi's autobiographical novel, in which he tells about his imprisonment in Auschwitz and his subsequent journey home across Europe. Including through post-war Ukraine, where Levi even lived in Vinnytsia for a while, working as a doctor. "The Truce was shot by a real champion team of Italian cinema, starting with Tonino Guerra, a screenwriter for the greats Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, and ending with composer Luis Bacalov (Django). No wonder this film, which concentrated the best qualities of national cinema, was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

"The Truce was supposed to be shot in Poland, but it turned out to be cheaper in Ukraine. The sets of the death camp were built in Ivano-Frankivsk, and the scenes of the hero's journey were filmed in Kyiv, Lviv and near Vinnytsia. For example, in one scene, the characters of John Turturro and Radi Sherbedzhia, known for the film The Big Short, enter a typical Lviv courtyard. According to the filming crew, the Italians were dissatisfied with the quality of Ukrainian hotels without hot water but with cockroaches, and were afraid to eat Ukrainian food, preferring canned goods. Fear of Chornobyl outweighed interest in national dishes, but that was the end of the Italians' negative impressions of Ukraine.

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