Aleksandr Kuznetsov starts our interview by telling me that he the only answers he can offer me are “weird and anarchistic” ones, as there’s no other way he can communicate just how bizarre his experience making Two Prosecutors was.
Director Sergei Loznitsa’s film, one of the most acclaimed premieres from last year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a suffocating anti-thriller set during Stalin’s reign, with Kuznetsov’s young, idealistic prosecutor trying to free a political prisoner, unaware that the system will be coming for him next for speaking out. It’s not the movie the actor thought he signed up to make.
“For the first seven days of shooting I was a bit shocked because Sergei doesn’t talk to you at all; he gets uncomfortable talking about the characters and their destinies, he believes that’s an actor's job. And I just didn’t understand what the f**k I was doing, especially looking around the set and seeing that he kept hiring people he’d found on the street to be extras - it was a weird zoo of people he thought had interesting faces!
“I wasn’t acting too much in the film, the reactions you see are largely me responding to the absurdity unfolding around me. And that’s when I grasped what the genre was supposed to be; it’s not a Stalinist regime period drama, it’s a dry, Kafkaesque comedy, and I gradually felt like I was in a warped Disneyland being at the centre of it.”
The Ukrainian-born, London-based Kuznetsov will be familiar to international viewers from appearances in the Fantastic Beasts franchise and the recent Idris Elba action-comedy Heads of State, films that would otherwise never be mentioned in the same breath as Two Prosecutors. However, his experiences in Hollywood couldn’t prepare him for the culture shock of this defiantly independent production.
“Sergei is a genius director, but when I got the script, it was just pure chaos on the page – I couldn’t work out what the f**k it was that I was reading, even though this was material about a part of history that people in Russia and Ukraine are deeply aware of. And he’s a director who is very focused and honest, but also struggles with communicating; my performance ended up reflecting all his characteristics by the end.
“He can often take up to 15 minutes to tell you why a take was bad, and often struggles to say exactly what it was he didn’t like – he'll just look you in the eyes, tell you to do it one more time, and you’ll probably find out later it had nothing to do with you, it was probably just a wire curled the wrong way in shot! I got angry at one point because he didn’t understand the subtleties of acting, but the process gradually rewired my brain and forced me to become better; now I can’t relax until the final take of the day has wrapped.”
Two Prosecutors is the rare film where you know the ending before you go in; the character’s fate is sealed the second he dares to dig deeper into a case, and his naivety about the Stalinist purges happening in the background is borderline dark comedy. However, Kuznetsov disagrees with his director that his character is too sheltered to notice the regime’s crimes happening around him.
“He’s not naive, he’s a samurai who chooses to see the evil of people as mistakes – he's empathetic, brave and strong to confront the system, qualities that would have made for a great leader in any other time. But this was a period where you couldn’t be loud or hysterical in confronting it or have the pessimistic worldview that everything is f***ed next to this huge plot against humanity, as neither reaction is practical.
“He’s idealistic as he thinks this is a system that can be fixed, but that doesn’t make him naive. He’s not a revolutionary either, just someone who thinks that simply following the good in people can help confront the corruption; the irony is he’d probably be the best leader of a communist state, because he couldn’t get corrupted!
“What we haven’t really said in the marketing is that it’s a biopic; the author of the novel (Georgy Demidov) was imprisoned in the exact jail of this movie, and his fellow inmate was the man who inspired my character, which inspired Demidov to write about his life story. In reality, the man was eventually forced to say he was the leader of a terror organisation in a trial as that was the only way he’d be allowed to stay alive – they threw him back in jail and killed him anyway.
“That was initially in the script, but we decided not to end inside the prison, because in 1937 people weren’t fully aware of the huge number of political prisoners and the torture that went on; people weren’t naive back then, it was just a fresh idea they couldn’t have assumed was happening. And that’s exactly how this lawyer experienced things, he wasn’t naive, just lacking in information – this is how dangerous it is not to see the bigger picture.
“This movie is a warning that heroism and good intentions don’t mean s**t if you can’t communicate with others, as totalitarian governments like Stalin’s thrive on isolating individuals and creating fear of the other, making people think they’re the only ones who have their backs. And that’s how societies become less about community, forcing people to stop protecting each other and suspecting them instead – believing that fear leads to manipulation.”
Naturally, there are modern day parallels, ones which hit particularly close to home for the actor.
“Some of my friends are in jail in Russia right now, and I haven’t gone back there in years – I see myself as a political immigrant (Kuznetsov moved to Russia at the beginning of his acting career). I’m considered an extremist in Russia for being a well-known actor who has spoken against the war in Ukraine.
“This is why community is important, and why this film isn’t exactly about heroism. Nobody wants to risk their lives to be the one person voicing dissent, but nor should more people be like my character – that just means hundreds of people will die, not one.
“You need to see the bigger picture, educate people, be more empathetic and active rather than naively think you can change a broken system on your own. It was impossible for this character to achieve that 100 years ago.”
Two Prosecutors premiered to rave reviews at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, although the actor spent the entire screening in fear that he’d created something “too niche”. The premiere took place at midnight, and he became worried people would fall asleep, eventually spending the later stages of the film hidden behind his hands, terrified that the audience was hating the movie so much they were turning against him specifically.
Thankfully, that wasn’t the case, and the actor now believes that his career is taking a far more interesting path in the wake of this project.
“When the war started, I got tons of material from Russia and Ukraine connected to it, but I’ve always refused to make movies about it – I don’t think you can make an accurate document of the war right now, even if you’re a very talented person, because it relies heavily on speculation. But strangely, in recent years, I’ve seen Slavic characters in western scripts becoming less cliched, no longer just as stereotypical criminals, but as tragic, complex people.
“I think it’s due to Yura Borisov getting the Oscar nomination for Anora – he's a genius who, back in the day, was my main competitor for roles back in Russia. I think that nomination showed that characters from our part of the world can be complex, and now every script I get with Slavic characters to audition for is interesting in a way that they weren’t before.”
