Russian actor Yura Borisov doesn't have much dialogue in the Oscar-nominated film Anora.
He plays a Russian henchman sent to bring home the reckless son of an oligarch, who's eloped with a Brooklyn sex worker named Anora.
Borisov's character Igor appears in the middle of the movie, when he bursts into the mansion where Anora and her beau Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) are living. Igor tries to subdue Ani, who's frightened and enraged, kicking and screaming at the prospect of being separated from her new husband.
Before filming the scene, Borisov asked actress Mikey Madison, who plays Ani, to hit him for real, as hard as she could. When asked if it hurt him, Borisov lets out a big laugh.
"I couldn't be hurt," he says. "I'm a man."
Yet his character is more complicated: As Igor, Borisov lives with his grandmother in the Russian immigrant enclave of Brighton Beach.
"For me, [I was] trying to show that someone could be [a] brute, but at the same time, very kind inside," Borisov tells NPR from his home in Moscow. "We're all fragile and sensitive deep inside. And [that's] OK."
By the end of the film, the quiet Igor emerges as a complicated and somewhat ambiguous romantic interest.
Anora has emerged in its own way in recent weeks, as a frontrunner in the Oscars race with six nominations, including for best picture. Borisov, who's up for best supporting actor, is the first Russian to be nominated for an acting Oscar since Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1977.
'People really fell in love with his character'
"I have to thank Yura for elevating what I had on the page," says director Sean Baker, who also wrote the screenplay. "People really fell in love with his character."
Baker says Borisov had a lot of questions before filming began. "He kept on asking me 'Is my character a Gopnik?' A gopnik is, like, a hoodlum," Baker recalls. "And we said, 'You might be perceived as a gopnik, but we actually think that you've been, because of economic reasons or whatever, forced to take certain jobs that have put you in a situation where you come across as one, because you're used as the heavy.'"
Baker says Borisov was very sensitive to what Igor would eventually become in Anora's life, and brought a lot of ideas to the table. At the end of the movie, Igor reveals that he's just turned 30. That, Baker says, was Borisov's suggestion; the 30th birthday is a significant "coming of age" marker in Russian culture. In one late night scene, Igor stuffs his mouth with burgers at a diner – an idea Borisov thought up. "He did that without a spit bucket!" marvels Baker.
When they went to scout locations in Brighton Beach, fans recognized Borisov and wanted to take selfies. The actor's popularity helped the crew secure the Russian restaurant Tatiana Grill in Brighton Beach as a filming location. Borisov also suggested casting another Russian actor, Mark Eydelshteyn, as Ivan, nicknamed Vanya, the oligarch's son and Ani's immature husband.
Baker says getting both actors to the U.S. was stressful. "It was Yura and Mark. I couldn't see making the film without them," he says. "We had to get a work visa, and that was a little complicated, quite honestly, especially during the war."
The 'Russian Ryan Gosling'
Baker says he was sure he wanted Borisov to be his Igor after seeing him in a Finnish film at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021. In Compartment Number 6, Borisov plays a young coal miner traveling by train.
Baker calls Borisov the "Russian Ryan Gosling." The 32-year-old actor was born in a town outside of Moscow, to a family of engineers and doctors. Borisov says they were skeptical about him studying theater at the university.
"They said, OK ... are you serious? Are you crazy? It's impossible, how could you get money? You need crazy luck," he recalls.
Borisov says he wrote a letter to his mother promising it would work out. "My goal," he says, "is to do my art with people which I love, and give this love to people around me."
Borisov went from playing soldiers in state-financed movies and TV projects to leads in international art house films.
"All of a sudden, he was in everything, everywhere all at once, pun intended," says Ellina Sattarova, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California who studies contemporary Russian cinema and its relationship to the country's politics.
Sattarova says Borisov aspired to be a method actor.
In an interview with YouTuber Yury Dud in 2020, Borisov talked about the lengths he'd go to prepare for a role. He said at one point, he was considering pulling out all of his teeth so that he could then use dentures for different roles.
"He did not end up doing it," notes Sattarova.
Reaction to Borisov's Oscar nomination in the former Soviet Union is mixed, says Sattarova.
"There's obviously some excitement to see Russia in the news in a context that is not related to the war," she says. "There are people who found all of the videos featuring his family's and his friend's reactions to the nomination really heartwarming. And then there are some videos that I've seen where people express their confusion and disbelief that this is happening."
Russia's government-run news agency TASS asked the Kremlin if Borisov's Oscar nomination signaled the end of what they framed as the West's "cancellation" of Russian culture. A spokesman for the Kremlin said, simply, no.
For his part, Borisov says he welcomes more international film projects, but doesn't plan to leave Russia. In fact, in his latest film, which just premiered, he portrays the famous Russian writer Alexander Pushkin.
"My fame," he recites as Pushkin in the movie's trailer, "shall spread throughout my country's realm."
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