‘Anora’ Star Mark Eydelshteyn’s Life Is a Movie

At a bustling New York City diner ringed by neon signage and decorated with frosted display cakes and glass jars of gumballs, Mark Eydelshteyn has just polished off a platter of french fries and a vanilla milkshake—a decidedly American delicacy.

“And I put the french fries in the milkshake, like Suzy in Red Rocket, her character,” the 22-year-old Russian actor tells me, referring to actress Suzanna Son, and filmmaker Sean Baker’s 2021 feature starring Son and Simon Rex. “The whole Sean Baker’s universe, I love. Because Sean Baker’s universe is like Spider-Man universe. Maybe better. And with huge souls from everybody.”

I don’t recall Son’s Red Rocket character, Strawberry, actually eating milkshake-dipped fries in that movie—which mostly just features a lot of doughnuts, a recurring Bakerverse motif—but nonetheless I know what he means. It’s a windy Monday afternoon, and we’re sitting in a snug two-top booth at Brooklyn Diner, which despite its name is actually located on a busy corner of West 57th Street in midtown Manhattan. This is a good place to meet, Eydelshteyn decides. “It’s like out of a movie.”

Brooklyn, as in the actual borough of Brooklyn, is where most of Baker’s latest film, the Palme d’Or–winning Anora takes place; Eydelshteyn plays Ivan, the hard-partying prodigal son of a Russian oligarch whose whirlwind situationship with the movie’s title character—an enterprising Brighton Beach stripper who prefers to go by Ani, played by Mikey Madison—devolves into a screwball thriller once Ivan’s parents find out that the pair have eloped: a real-deal legal marriage, albeit at the Little White Chapel amid a Las Vegas bender. But if the first 45 minutes of Anora feel as euphoria-inducing as a whippit, it’s because Eydelshteyn’s Ivan is the charming nitrous oxide that keeps the high afloat.

Eydelshteyn—whose promotional duties have brought him back to New York for the first time since Anora wrapped filming in early 2023—didn’t grow up with diners like this one, where the take-no-shit waiters wear white shirts and black ties while serving overpriced platters of eggs and toast to tourists. The equivalent in his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, an 800-year-old city on the Volga River in western Russia, are places called anti-cafés, where customers pay by the hour to sit and food is included. “You can listen [to] vinyl there, read books, talk with the people, [but] you are not paying for coffee and dessert or cookies or something,” he explains. “You are paying for time.”

Today, the actor is wearing a soft navy sweater, neat slacks, and unscuffed Chelsea boots—a notably sleeker look than the post-swag designer outfits his character Ivan (who sometimes goes by Vanya) sports in the film. Though the inner corner of Eydelshteyn’s right eyebrow is currently bleached for another project he’s filming in Moscow, his angular bone structure and dark messy waves would otherwise make him a top contender in any Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest. Indeed, he was tagged as the “Russian Timothée Chalamet” when he first began acting in his home country, and the moniker has understandably followed him, given Anora’s international success. Since he’s been back in the US doing press, he can’t even count the number of times he’s been asked about his likeness to the boyish-waifish Hollywood star.

Not unlike his character Ivan, Eydelshteyn is splitting his time now between Russia and the States. (Also, like Ivan, he speaks English with a cute Russian accent and is rarely far from some sort of nicotine source, be it a cigarette or a vape.) “Honestly, I have no home right now. My home right now is [the] place where I’m working,” he says. The Anora press tour has brought him to exotic national locales such as Telluride, Colorado (a “magic place” with “magic mountains”), and Los Angeles (too much Ubering, he determines). As is a rite of passage for countless young men before him, he’s really into the Beats—Kerouac, Ginsberg—and he’s been photographing all the new places on his film camera, which he carries with him today. He wants to turn his thoughts and images into “a little book.”

Among other things, Anora is a great addition to the New York City movie canon. While filming Anora in south Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach—one of America’s largest enclaves of Russian speakers—Eydelshteyn couldn’t help but wonder, “Are we in America? Are we in 30 minutes from Manhattan? How it’s possible? It felt like all these buildings, are they in fairy tales? It’s like cookie building, like a cookie area.”

“Like gingerbread houses,” I offer.

“Coney Island, like a gingerbread park,” he concurs. “These restaurants on the beach, they’re really unnatural. But why they felt unnatural because they’re too natural. They are too realistic. These people are very bright there and they are very open and they’re different from people from Manhattan.”

Eydelshteyn alternates between being goofy and pensive, and like many thoughtful 22-year-olds, he is prone to philosophizing. (His publicist tells me that, prior to our interview, the actor took a solo smoke break outside the diner to collect his thoughts so he could give “smart answers.”) He says the various parts of the United States he's been to “mostly [feel] like different countries. It’s different rules of the road; it’s different people; it’s different rhythm of steps. Different intonation of dialogues. Different music inside cinema theaters. I don’t know. Everything is different.”

He’s enjoying this transient state, in a metaphysical sense. “There is time to collect flowers, there is time to present flowers, and now I’m collecting flowers,” he says, before realizing he’s mixed up his Biblical metaphors; instead, Ecclesiastes 3:5 speaks of stones. Still, the thought stands. And Eydelshteyn is gathering up a quarry’s worth.

Mark Eydelshteyn arrived in New York to film Anora just after the new year in early 2023; it was his first time in the States. That February he celebrated his 21st birthday, and on the day, the film’s crew—including Madison, fellow Russian actor Yura Borisov, plus Baker and his wife/producing partner Samantha Quan—chartered a rented boat through the frigid New York Harbor to see the Statue of Liberty.

“It was really cold because it’s February,” he tells me at the diner, “but we did it and it was the most happiest birthday.” (That said, as Eydelshteyn reminds me later with a laugh, winter in New York is nothing like winter in Nizhny Novgorod: “It’s not so cold. It’s almost without snow!”)

All of them took turns driving the boat, but Eydelshteyn says Madison took to the task most naturally. “Mikey’s very, very amazing in driving boat. I don’t know how it's possible, but she’s like, ‘Well,’” he recounts, shrugging his shoulders, “and then one second, she’s the captain of the boat. Really, it suits her. [She’s] just talented person, talented in everything.” If she ever decides to direct a movie, Eydelshteyn has said, he’d like to act in it.

Madison—previously best known for the FX series Better Things; her turn as a Manson girl in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood; and the 2022 Scream reboot—also became one of Eydelshteyn’s NYC tour guides during production. He remembers one evening when he, Madison, and two of her friends whom he describes as “huge actors” (he declines to tell me their names) snuck onto the roof of a high-rise hotel near Central Park.

Listening to Aphex Twin and William Basinski on Eydelshteyn’s portable speaker, they looked out over the city and talked into the night about philosophy and “teenager problems.” The whole scene of it—the view; the ambient music; the idea that he could find common ground with two of “the most famous actors in the world right now” just by nature of being of a similar age and happening to exist in the same space and time—felt, too, like a movie.

But as Eydelshteyn puts it, he experienced “two different New Yorks” during that time, the second being the one he and Borisov explored together, as two countrymen both seeing America for the first time. “We were like kids in the Disneyland, because you see this bridge, Broadway street, Times Square. You see this real Coca-Cola!” He laughs. “It is crazy because it’s Coca-Cola, yeah, we saw Coca-Cola for a million times [before]. But the best place for Coca-Cola is Times Square.”

Borisov is a well-known performer in Russia—GQ Russia named him its actor of the year in 2020—and in Anora he plays Igor, one-third of the henchmen trio that Ivan’s parents sic on Ani and Ivan in order to force them to annul their marriage. Igor, the requisite “muscle” whom Madison's Ani pejoratively calls a gopnik, becomes the soulful foil to callow Ivan’s impulsiveness. (I ask Eydelshteyn, given that he’s the “Russian Timothée Chalamet,” who Borisov’s counterpart might be; he says he’s heard comparisons to Jeremy Allen White thrown around. Twitter has also mentioned James McAvoy.)

During production, Eydelshteyn and Borisov lived in the same Brighton Beach apartment where they would wake up early to run along the sand, which Eydelshteyn says is “the best place to see sunrise.”

Over one holiday break, the two shared a room in a rented house upstate next to a river; early one winter morning, before they’d even gotten out of bed, they decided to make a sprint for the water, jumping into the freezing river together.

“It was very cold, but we were already running, we already had to do it,” Borisov told me in an email.

In the course of their time together, “we talked about everything in the world: about our dreams, and how and why the universe was created, and what we will eat for breakfast tomorrow,” said Borisov. “I can't imagine this movie without Mark. I can't imagine my job and my role, and my life in the US during this period without Mark. He is very dear and important to me. Both to me and to this film, as I see it.”

Incidentally, Borisov was instrumental in Eydelshteyn nabbing the role in the first place. The two actors had met a year earlier at the Berlin International Film Festival, where Eydelshteyn was promoting the Russian coming-of-age dramedy The Land of Sasha, while Borisov was about to fly to the US to meet Sean Baker, who previously directed Tangerine and The Florida Project.

At the Berlinale, Eydelshteyn tells me, “I met Yura just on the street and I said, ‘Hi, I’m Mark, you are Yura Borisov, I know you. You are the most famous and amazing, incredible actor from Russia.’ He said, ‘Yes, I know you, you have a movie here.’” When Borisov later learned that Baker was still hunting to find the right actor for Ivan (they’d initially thought to cast a Russian pop star), he said he had just the guy in mind.

Or, as Eydelshteyn puts it, “when Sean [told him], ‘I am looking for some crazy Russian guy,’ Yura said, ‘Wow, I met with a crazy Russian guy like three days before—Mark! You have to connect with him.’”

Then came what has turned into Eydelshteyn’s go-to anecdote during the Anora press tour, which is that he was naked when he filmed the self-taped audition that got him the part. His logic was that the unfathomably wealthy Ivan would have a closet full of only designer clothing, and since Eydelshteyn had no such clothing, it would be more authentic to wear nothing at all. (According to Eydelshteyn, his publicists have jokingly advised him to stop telling this story, but the cat’s already out of the bag.)

Naturally, because Eydelshteyn has “some director’s ambitions” (he’s made a short film already, and he’s interested in making more), he arranged the cinematography in such a way that in the clip he first faced out toward a window, his back to the camera. “And then when I am turning to the camera with my nude body,” he explains, the camera zooms in on his face in a close-up.

“It came across just so sincere, so innocent, quite honestly,” says Baker, who hopes to include Eydelshteyn’s storied audition tape in the special features if Anora gets released on DVD or Blu-ray. “Yes, he was in the nude, [but] it was way more comical than anything else, and he was performing with this beanie on his head and smoking a cigarette and sunglasses. Of course, the sight was a little jaw-dropping, but once we got past that, the performance itself was spot on—so much that we couldn’t see anybody else for the role. I mean, to the point where it got really stressful, because we didn’t know whether or not we were gonna get the visa for him in time.” When Baker’s producer picked him up at JFK Airport, they all breathed a sigh of relief.

Baker said that Eydelshteyn wound up pitching or improvising several of Ivan’s most memorable lines and quirks on set. It was his idea that Ivan would be constantly puffing on a vape, and that when Ivan and Ani are about to have sex for the first time—in Ivan’s family’s massive, neoteric mansion overlooking Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn’s Mill Basin, in a bedroom tricked out with a TV lift cabinet and red silk sheets—his character would backflip out of his boxers onto the bed. But Baker’s favorite moment of Mark improv might be when Ivan proposes to Ani. After Ani asks him if he’s serious, Ivan replies, “I’m serious, and I said it twicely.”

They filmed the whole sequence in a penthouse hotel suite in Las Vegas, another place that figures prominently in Eydelshteyn’s understanding of American culture.

“It’s maybe the most craziest place where I ever been,” the actor tells me. “But it’s my problem, because I imagine that Las Vegas, it’s like from the movies, where are people having fun, celebrating their life and winning money, lots of money, millions of billions of money. And just, I don’t know, hanging out in the best quality. Best quality of hanging out. Yes. It’s Las Vegas.”

The city might be a quality hang for someone like Ivan—but if you’ve ever walked into the ground floor of a Vegas casino, you’d know that isn’t what Eydelshteyn found. Instead, he saw “people sitting against these machines with a poker face and you just feel how this machine sucks energy from you and you’re doing it one more time,” he tells me. He has a theory: “For people who have lots of money, [winning isn’t] important and it’s not interesting already. So it’s a hell, it’s a depressive hell. But I really want to come back there. And it’s the point of Las Vegas! That you hate it but you want to come back.

“It’s mythic, how can I say it? Mythic place, like Homer, Iliad, Odyssey, mythic place,” he continues. “Because you can’t explain it. I don’t know what’s happening with the souls there.”

That, or “just maybe miracle of American Dream [is that] the whole your life you’re approaching to American Dream, and it’s more and more far from you with your every step.”

The experience of making Anora, and watching Sean Baker and Mikey Madison take risks in their craft, has made Eydelshteyn want to make more movies, in all the roles that entails.

“I realized that it’s possible, and I can feel pleasure when I’m doing it and I can take this responsibility,” he says. “Because I think the main challenge for directors to take the whole responsibility from movie to yourself.”

There’s a saying in English, I tell him: “High risk, high reward.” It might be more true in art than it is in gambling.

But for Mark, when it comes to creative risk-taking, he prefers the philosophy of the samurai—the idea that “that samurai has to be ready every time to die. Only with this statement inside his heart, he will be a real samurai. Because if you’re not ready, you’re not samurai.”

He recently watched and loved Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, the Ryan Murphy–fied crime drama series starring Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez. It made him think about the idea of the antihero, something he considered often when he was playing Ivan.

“For me, it was a big challenge to do him bigger than just antagonist,” he says, adding that he and Baker imagined Ivan going through the film in three stages: the first, as a freewheeling prince; the second, a responsibility-avoidant kid; the third, a reluctant villain.

His acting North Star, as is likely true for many in his generation, is Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. “Heath Ledger hacked the system. Really hacked the system.”

Eydelshteyn saw Anora for the first time in May, when the movie premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. During the screening, he sat in the audience beside Madison.

“I wasn’t ready to watch it,” he admits. Because Baker shot on film, it was easy for Mark to avoid watching the playback footage. He was also anxious about the ending, for the moment when he would break the audience’s heart. “In that moment, I realized that the whole connection that I had with the audience will, in one moment, just break. [Ivan]’s breaking his own heart also. It’s a very scary thing, to lose himself.”

He recalls the moment the film’s memorable opening shot hit the screen—“with booties, yes, and it’s Anora, dance music in the club. I remember I took Mikey’s hand and just like, ‘Okay, okay, let’s go through it together, please. It's very brave to start from this shot and maybe we already lose the audience right now.’ And she said, ‘Mark, I already watched the movie. Everything will be okay. Just believe me.’ And I said, ‘Okay, but I still hold your hand.’”

Soon enough, he heard applause, laughter. He went into a metaphysical state. “After first two scenes, I already forget that we are in Cannes Film Festival in this theater,” he said. “That there are lots of people watching our movie. I just was there with Mikey’s character, with Yura’s character, Vache [Tovmasyan], Karren [Karagulian]. In the end, I just started crying.” And then, a standing ovation. And then, the Palme D’Or.

Even remembering it now, Eydelshteyn says, “I can’t describe this feeling, because I was out of my body at that moment.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

Photographs by Bowen Fernie
Grooming by Melissa DeZarate using Dior Le Baume
Special thanks to Sekas International Ltd. @sekasintlltd