Yura Borisov may not have been physically present when Anora swept the DGAs, PGAs, and Critics Choice awards, but emotionally he was there. “My heart
Yura Borisov may not have been physically present when Anora swept the DGAs, PGAs, and Critics Choice awards, but emotionally he was there. “My heart is with them,” he says. Back at home in his native Moscow, Borisov hadn’t had a chance to speak with star Mikey Madison or writer-director Sean Baker about Anora’s game-changing weekend, launching Neon’s movie from underdog to top dog in this year’s ultracompetitive best-picture Oscar race. “We’re just texting, but we will talk soon,” he says. “Lots of hugs.”
There have been a lot of reasons for hugs. The 32-year-old has earned his first Oscar nomination for playing Igor, Anora’s taciturn bodyguard of sorts who winds up forging an unexpected connection with the jilted and fiery sex worker. Nominated alongside more established actors Guy Pearce, Jeremy Strong, Edward Norton, and Kieran Culkin, the relative newcomer is the first Russian actor to be nominated for an Academy Award since Mikhail Baryshnikov for The Turning Point in 1978. Like his character Igor, Borisov is a Russian who chooses his words carefully. While we chat, a translator is present off-camera and, as far as I can tell, is never used, as Borisov describes his life before Anora won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May and unofficially began its Oscar campaign.
An award-winning actor in Russia, Borisov made his film debut at 17 while still in school. “It was kind of a boring life when I was finishing my school,” he says. The boredom inspired him to pursue a career in film precisely because it didn’t feel like a customary job. “I was trying to understand what I can do for work [that didn’t feel like] work—just celebrate my life and spend every day like a holiday.” After considering teaching poetry at a university, he landed on the life of an actor. “I do nothing every day,” he says, with a smile. “For me, it’s not a job, it’s just life.”
Borisov was eventually able to build a film career out of his passion for acting “very slowly, step by step” in Russia, acting in film and television in his homeland and winning the Golden Eagle (Russia’s equivalent of an Oscar) in 2020 for playing Mikhail Kalashnikov, the Russian general who invented the assault rifle, in the biopic Kalashnikov. The following year, Borisov starred in Juho Kuosmanen’s drama Compartment No. 6, which played at the Cannes Film Festival, the same year Sean Baker happened to be at the festival with his A24 film Red Rocket. Borisov’s performance blew Baker away, leading the auteur to offer Borisov a part in his next feature, which, at that point, had not been written yet. “It was kind of a shock for me when Sean called me and said, ‘Let’s do my next film together,’” he said. “I answered, ‘Maybe.’”
He eventually signed on and even helped Baker land another key Russian character in the film: Anora’s Gen Z Prince Charming playboy Vanya, played by newcomer Mark Eydelshteyn. Borisov was familiar with Eydelshteyn’s work in Russia, and when Baker said he needed a adolescent actor who was confident enough with improvisation to play the immature heir, Borisov knew just the person. “I called Mark and said, ‘Hey, guy, could you send me some photos [of yourself]? I want to send it to an American director.’” After Eydelshteyn sent in a naked self-tape—a bold move, to be sure—he booked the part.
Although Anora was Baker’s brainchild, Borisov says he had a lot of freedom on set to make Igor his own. The director, Borisov says, constantly asked the actors for their thoughts on the script. ‘“What do you think? What’s better for your character, for this scene, for this film? What do you feel? How do you feel?’” he remembers Baker asking. “He’s open to everything, and we could try everything.” This included translating Baker’s dialogue from English to Russian however Borisov wanted to. “Take by take, I translated in a new way,” he says. “It was different every time.” Translating on the fly may sound daunting, but Borisov says that acting in English and in his native Russian is “absolutely the same.” “I could use my misunderstanding of the language for my character,” he says.
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