A young man runs down a busy Beverly Hills sidewalk, his jeans practically pooled around his ankles. A photographer captures him as he goes; at a red traffic light, people on the street stop and gawk, wondering whether the shoot’s subject is famous. Have they seen him in a movie or a TV show before? Is he an influencer?
The light turns green. They move on, left wondering – for now at least.
The boy barely holding his trousers up and making funny faces to the camera (“So Zoolanderish!” his publicist says) is the soon-to-be famous actor Mark Eydelshteyn. Since May of this year, when his new film Anora premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, winning director Sean Baker the prestigious Palme d’Or, the Russian 22-year-old has been on a life-altering trip around the world. In the film, a boyish Eydelshteyn plays Ivan, the rowdy son of a Russian oligarch. When the film’s protagonist, a stripper named Anora played by Scream star Mikey Madison, meets him at the New York club she works in, the pair embark on a whirlwind romance. They get married – only for their nuptials to unleash the wrath of his very rich family.
In between photo setups, Eydelshteyn attempts to climb a palm tree (there’s less of them where he’s from) before asking for his personal film camera, a vintage red Wisen. He’s been using the artefact to take photos everywhere that Anora has taken him. He playfully snaps a photo of his new entourage of publicists.
“The North Pole, Telluride, Los Angeles and Moscow are all in one roll,” he later tells me at a plush restaurant inside the Beverly Hills Hotel, speaking in slightly broken English. “I haven’t gotten time to stop and analyse what’s happening at a very high speed. These film rolls stop me, and I can see that, ‘Wow, in 10 days I [have been] here and here.”
Under his youthful goofiness lies a deep thinker. Sharing the mindset of many of today’s young actors (Paul Mescal being the king of it), he’s drawn to shooting exclusively on film. His mind is wired like the dismal geniuses of Soviet cinema. He says of his photos: “They will be forever on a negative because everything digital will die.”
An avid reader from a young age, Eydelshteyn cites J. D. Salinger’s Zen short story Teddy as his favourite piece of literature – as a teenager, he even wrote a screenplay adaptation for a short film. He was, at that age, an “observer of the beauty of the world” around him, a quality that serves him well as a performer. As he speaks with me, he veers from a vivacious demeanour to a pensive one, his hands playing nervously with whatever object is within reach.
His early years growing up in the western Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, also the hometown of supermodel Natalia Vodianova, were mostly ordinary. His father is a sports journalist (though Eydelshteyn doesn’t much care for sports) and his mother teaches oratory. Together, they raised Eydelshteyn and his younger brother, who’s an aspiring filmmaker. Now, Eydelshteyn’s mother, who he sorrowfully describes as “an unsuccessful actress,” lives vicariously through his triumphs. “When I was a kid, she sat on my bed and told me about princesses and dragons,” he lovingly recalls. “And now my life is a fairy tale, honestly.”
As a teenager searching for a clique to belong to, Eydelshteyn tried to assert his identity through fashion. The first time he got punched in the face he was in high school, wearing skinny red jeans and a Zara long-sleeve T-shirt bearing an American flag. The outfit earned him the wrong kind of attention. Later, though his mother warned him against pursuing acting, he found himself hanging with theatre folks.
“Timothée Chalamet is like my teacher”
Eventually, using the money he earned from a modelling gig with designer Gosha Rubchinskiy, he travelled to Moscow in secret (or “ran away” as he puts it). Eydelshteyn didn’t share his plans with his parents until he’d already been admitted into the Moscow Art Theatre School. “In that moment, I felt freedom for the first time, and I saw that the world was not just beautiful, but big,” he says.
While still a student, he acted in short films (he once played a guy selling illegal music CDs during Soviet times in a commercial) and, in 2021, made brief appearances in Russian YA TV shows. Eydelshteyn’s breakthrough came when he landed the lead part in The Land of Sasha, a Russian coming-of-age story that premiered at the Berlinale in 2022. In the title role of Sasha, the actor plays a 17-year-old boy who grew up without a father as he navigates his relationships with the women in his life.
Baker reached out to Eydelshteyn based on the recommendation of another Russian actor in Anora, Yura Borisov, who plays one of the gentle henchman working for Ivan’s father. Borisov had briefly shared the screen with Eydelshteyn back home in the TV series Guest from the Future.
The director asked Eydelshteyn to self-tape two dialogue-heavy scenes that take place after Ivan has first had sex with Anora. Eydelshteyn had not seen any of Baker’s films – among them the likes of The Florida Project and Tangerine – and decided to keep it that way. “Subconsciously they would have been my reference,” he says.
Eydelshteyn recorded his self-tape topless because he didn’t own any clothes that someone as wealthy as Ivan would wear. Once he saw it, Baker couldn’t picture anybody else for the role. “I could just see that there was a craft going on behind it,” Baker recalls in a phone interview. “It was very calculated, and he was flat-out entertaining.”
Baker had at one point considered casting a Russian pop star he found on Instagram. However, Eydelshteyn, who Baker says “brought a Great Gatsby feel to the character,” pinned down Ivan’s unique boyish narcissism. “When I was 21 I was very self-centred, not really thinking about others’ feelings,” Baker says. “Mark is just totally an empath, thinking about others at all times.”
For Eydelshteyn, the key to playing Ivan rested in understanding “he’s not a bad guy but just a kid who tried to find home and love,” he says. “I connected with him because I’m also looking for that and I feel, myself, lonely.”
Eydelshteyn didn’t meet Madison, his co-star, until he arrived in New York’s Russian-speaking immigrant neighbourhood of Brighton Beach, where the bulk of the story unfolds. He saw Manhattan’s skyscrapers for the first time while Madison played the Frank Ocean track “Super Rich Kids.” She suggested its lyrics could help him embody Ivan.
Thanks to Anora, comparisons to a certain American artistic doppelgänger, ones that have followed him in the Russian press since The Land of Sasha, have exploded. Now everyone is dubbing him “the Russian Timothée Chalamet” on social media. He graciously accepts the compliment. “It’s a great comparison because he’s an amazing actor,” he says. “He’s like my teacher, I study his way of acting and his way of building characters.”
Eydelshteyn is nearing the end of several days of promotion in Los Angeles. Next, he’ll head to New York. “We did more than 35 interviews yesterday in the—” he pauses and consults one of his publicists sitting at a nearby table. “Junket,” she replies. There have been lots of first experiences for him on this trip.
I ask Eydelshteyn if he’s eager to tell his mother about the most recent chapter of his ongoing fairy tale. He smiles. “I have to unpack all of these feelings inside me first.”
Credits
Writer: Carlos Aguilar
Photography: Lindsay Ellary
Styling: Luca Kingston and Amanda Lim
Grooming: Sonia Lee
Photography Assistant: Lexi Wimberly