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Do you remember Rocky Balboa
's puerile and tearful speech
from a ring in Moscow with the entire Politburo listening in awe?
The most uncoordinated fighter in the history of boxing had just knocked down a massacred
Ivan Drago
and was trying to convince the crowd that friendship between enemy powers was possible.
Those were the times of American
made in Hollywood
where the stars and stripes boys were the good ones and the
Russians the disastrous and embittered ones
, dispossessed of all freedom and subjected to a decadent regimen of cold, vodka and long queues to get hold of a roll of toilet paper.
That enemy is back today thanks to
Vladimir Putin.
A part of the Russian and Belarusian community of actors in Los Angeles fears that the old stereotype about their careers will be revisited.
Gene Farber,
a 43-year-old actor with roles in films such as
Captain America: Civil War
or
X-Men: First Class
, is convinced that the narrative will run there in a couple of months, whether the war in Ukraine ends or continues. .
"We Russians are once again
the bad guys in the movie
in Hollywood," he tells EL MUNDO in a telephone interview.
And that he was born in
Minsk
.
“Here it is difficult for them to understand the difference.”
Nor has it helped him shake the cliché that he came to the United States at the age of 11 and spent most of his life here.
His family was part of the
exodus
to the West after the fall of the
Soviet Union
, on a "hard" journey through several countries until they reached Queens, New York.
"I estimate that 70% of all the roles I've done in Hollywood are
villains
on the other side of the
Iron Curtain,
" she estimates.
«Not only Russian, but Serbian, Georgian, Croatian, almost always a mobster, part of organized crime.
It doesn't matter that he speaks perfect English and that he is American.
It is what it is and now it can go further.
Farber repudiates the war in the Ukraine.
"
It's horrible
what's happening," he says.
It has also cost him two important projects that he was going to star in, one of a Russian cowboy in the Far West, and another with the filming planned in Chernobyl and produced by
Yan Romanovsky
.
Like Farber, this Russian raised in Tel Aviv believes that Hollywood "will be cautious" when hiring actors who come from the "invading country."
"I think it will depend on the position they have against the war," he tells this newspaper.
Romanovsky left the
former USSR
at the age of 12 and now he doesn't even consider himself Russian anymore.
"There I feel like a foreigner", although many of his projects depended on his compatriots, "on rich people who now have frozen capital and that has already cost me three projects."
Deep down he thinks they deserved it.
“They have done nothing for years despite having a
dictatorship
in front of them.
They were comfortable, they made money and they were doing well.
Now they are paying the price.
To some extent they are guilty.
The producer of
Papillon
and
Criminal Games
only hopes that both inside and outside the industry they know how to differentiate those who are for and against the war.
"They should not see us as the
aggressor
because we have nothing to do with Putin and his ideals.
We are clearly
against the war
and the brainwashing that is being done to the people through the
regime 's
propaganda channels."
Russian actress Svetlana Efremova with Kristin Lehman in an episode of the series 'Motive'.
It is a fear similar to that of
Svetlana Efremova
, an actress who took advantage of a tour with the Leningrad Theater Academy -before it was renamed Saint Petersburg- to settle in the US.
The three decades that she has been in Los Angeles do not seem like a sufficient shield for situations of
potential discrimination
.
“Why would they treat me differently?
Because I'm Russian? », she wonders.
"I really hope that doesn't happen because that would be
racism
, discrimination.
Like the people who are being rejected in restaurants and hotels in Europe for being Russian.
That's terrible".
Work doesn't think I'm going to miss it.
Have a print resume.
She has roles in series such as
House of Cards, The Americans
or
Rizzoli
and Isles, plus the drama classes that she teaches after having studied at Yale and having shone on
Broadway
.
She would not be surprised, however, that there is a paradigm shift, that stereotypes are installed again and the villains and
villains
are her compatriots after the conflict in Ukraine.
"I hope it doesn't happen, really, but I wouldn't be surprised," she says.
"It would show
absolute
narrow-mindedness ."
Pasha Lychnikoff
does
n't really care whether or not he is pigeonholed into a certain role.
"The only thing that matters to me is to stop the war, denounce that this is a mistake at all levels," says the actor, unable to control the emotion on the other end of the phone.
"Sorry.
I can barely hold back the
tears
.
This is a massacre of innocent people, disguised as a special operation.
But nothing to see.
It's a slaughter.
The city of
Kharkov
reminds me of
Stalingrad
during the Second World War, of the fighting between Russians and Germans».
Lychnikoff is a veteran of that other war that is waged daily in Los Angeles to get a good role and make ends meet.
The 55-year-old Muscovite has done well.
In the bag he has roles in
Deadwood,
the HBO series, Showtime's
Shameless
, and
The Jungle: A Good Day to Die,
starring
Bruce Willis.
"It is important to speak against the war so that we are not discriminated against or rejected," he analyzes.
“People must understand
our pain
and know how to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones, as they say.
Still, they may start to look at us
suspiciously
, like decades ago.
Now the important thing is not the work, it is to stop the dead».
And if another wave of titles comes to debase the old enemy empire and extol the virtues of the glorious Yankee network, let it come.
"At least in that the war can give us back something of what it has taken from us," says Farber.
«In a few months they will
select us again as the villains
.
And of course labels annoy me and pigeonholing you, but it's worse not working.
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Vladimir Putin
Ukraine WarPutin's Dangerous Friendships: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sharon Stone and All the Stars Who Took Russian Money
War in UkraineRussian culture challenges Putin: resignations, cancellations and closed museums
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