Actor Yura Borisov, called the “Ryan Gosling of Russia” by director Sean Baker, was until recently mostly known for winning Best Leading Actor at The Golden Eagle Awards (the country’s Academy Awards equivalent) back home in 2021. Borisov was nominated that year for portraying Mikhail Kalashnikov in a 2020 propaganda film named after the military engineer’s most famous and enduring invention (AK-47.) Borisov’s leap into American filmmaking with Baker made history last month. He’s the first Russian actor in nearly 50 years to snag an Oscar nomination for his breakout role as Igor in Sean Baker’s Anora.
The film is a tender reimagining of the Cinderella story about a sex worker in Brooklyn. Filmed in the ex-Soviet community of Brighton Beach, Borisov was occasionally recognized by fans walking by—a distraction that earned its keep when his fame helped secure filming locations the crew wouldn’t have access to otherwise. Back in Russia, however, Borisov’s Oscar nomination has sparked confusion and silence among Kremlin elites, challenging their narrative of the West’s cancellation of Russian culture.
Anora won the 2024 Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. Borisov’s nuanced portrayal of Igor, a henchman with a tender side, also earned the actor widespread acclaim and nominations for other major awards, including the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, Critics Choice, and SAG Awards.
“Yura’s very kind and I think you can feel it. He’s such a unique type of person,” said Borisov’s Anora co-star Mark Eydelshteyn, who also shared the screen with the actor in the Russian sci-fi epic Guest From The Future last year. In Anora, Borisov’s Igor is the hero to Eydelshteyn’s villain-of-sorts, Ivan. Eydelshteyn credits Borisov with modeling how to “stay human” when the media’s attention is trained on an actor. “It’s really hard to do and he nailed it,” the actor said of his co-star.
Borisov’s Oscar nomination makes him the first Russian actor to be nominated in an acting category since Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1977 for The Turning Point. The last to win was Lila Kedrova in 1964 for Zorba the Greek. But Borisov would rather focus on his work than the historical significance of the prospective accolades.
Ahead of Anora‘s big night, we spoke with the actor about his hand in completing the film’s cast, which characters he can actually empathize with, and the eye-opening experience of filming in Coney Island and Brighton Beach from January to April 2023.
Are you anything like your character Igor?
It’s hard to say if I’m anything like my character because it’s hard to say who I am and what I am like. I guess one can see it better from the outside. My life is completely different from Igor’s. So it’s hard to compare, but Igor is a very important character for me. He’s reserved, yet sensitive to people. Strong, but kind of vulnerable. He doesn’t have any friends at all, because here he is alone in a foreign country and, due to his unsociability, he didn’t really make friends there. So he’s a lonely man who meets this girl, Anora, who he thinks (and I think so too) is lonely in her own way. It’s just that this loneliness is expressed in a different way. And they go through some kind of journey together, they need each other for some reason.
How did you help Sean Baker cast Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan?
I met Mark during the Berlinale in 2022. I watched his film The Land of Sasha and I really liked him as an actor. Then we met in person there in Berlin, spent a couple of days together, and at some point later when I met with Sean to discuss his film Anora, I told him Mark could do an interesting job as Ivan. So Sean reached out to him, Mark recorded an audition where he was completely naked, as Sean later told us.
Do you think his character, the son of Russian oligarchs who also abandons Anora, is a bad guy?
No, I don’t really think he’s a bad guy. Ivan goes through tough challenges that we see throughout the movie. He’s tested by money, he’s also tested in part by loneliness, because people around him are willing to share some fun with him, but they’re not willing to share in his pain. I think of him as someone who has a lot on his plate and who has a lot to deal with.
How did you picture New York before you arrived?
As a child, I watched many movies that were filmed in NYC, that’s why it was weird to find myself there. Because since my childhood I thought of it as of some imaginary world that exists only in movies. On the one hand, you are familiar with the image of the streets, architecture, some details of the city, steam from beneath the ground which I know from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, as well as from many other movies… On the other hand, it’s a completely unfamiliar city, because the movies that I watched as a child were all dubbed, and people in the city used to speak Russian.
And what from your experience in the city sticks with you?
It was my first time in the US. Obviously I knew everybody there spoke English, well not only English. Still, you find yourself in a new place, which is familiar in a way, but at the same time you don’t understand its rules, it’s mood. And New York is very diverse, there are a lot of different neighborhoods, they are all very different from each other.
But actually, for the most part, I experienced the city via the people we worked with. For me, NYC is them. We had a very cool team who wanted to do something interesting and unique. On weekends we would sometimes go to different places near the city to spend time together, to keep exchanging energy, feeling, sensing each other. These people for me are the New York City that will never be repeated. The next time I am in the city, it will be a completely different place, because it will not have these people, and even if it does, it will no longer have the thing that connected us all.
Once Ivan is out of the picture, we discover Igor is Anora’s real love interest. How did you play Igor in his early scenes to prepare the character to become more important as the movie progressed?
Since Igor appears in the middle of the story, at the moment when the plot is already rushing forward at breakneck speed, it seemed to me that at such moment you shouldn’t steal the show. You just jump in that train, ride it for a while until the rest of the passengers get off the train one by one, and then, when you have to make some decisions and take action, start doing it calmly and consistently.
I think that’s determined by Igor’s character, who is a very calm, consistent person. And at the end, his inner values guide his actions in the finale.
Tell me about working with Mikey Madison as Anora.
Mikey is an incredible actress. She is able to switch instantly between life and fiction within a take. When we improvised together, we didn’t feel we need to agree to anything in advance. We would try something, then correct it and try again. And of course, on top of everything else, Mikey is an incredibly beautiful girl and great person.
You filmed in Russian neighborhoods in Brighton Beach and Coney Island. Immigrant communities often don’t replicate their home countries. Was anything familiar to you in those neighborhoods?
These are very interesting neighborhoods, because of course some things seem familiar there, but it’s only some visual elements. Some restaurant interiors are similar to Russia in the early 2000s. People there speak a very interesting language: it’s Russian, but it’s full of American words, American concepts that are easier to say in English. So it is such a mixed language, funny in many ways.
There is no sense of being in Russia there. It is in its own way the face of people who came from Russia some time ago to this place and stayed here and how they have changed or how something in them has changed while something else has remained exactly the same. It’s really interesting to see.
The post ‘Anora’ Star Yura Borisov Thought He Knew NYC. Then He Filmed Here. appeared first on BKMAG.
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