Dmitry Lysenkov, the stage Hamlet Russian cinema keeps casting as a rat

Dmitry Lysenkov

Photo: Дмитрий Дубинский / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 6, 1982 Leningrad, Soviet Union
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Silver Skates, Stalingrad, The Master and Margarita
Awards	Golden Mask · Russian Government Prize in Culture · Stanislavsky Prize · Vladislav Strzhelchik Prize

Dmitry Lysenkov has a name for the part of his film career that most viewers know. He calls it his grey period, because the costumes made for him on set are mostly grey: ministry officials, fixers, a literary critic who helps destroy a writer. On stage the same actor has played Hamlet, Khlestakov and Svidrigailov, and won the Golden Mask, Russia’s leading theatre prize, for the last of them. The distance between those two careers is the most interesting thing about him, and he is the first to point at it.

On screen he is usually the man beside the lead. In The Ninth, Nikolay Khomeriki‘s gothic thriller set in a Saint Petersburg swept up in a craze for spiritualism, he is Ganin, the assistant to Evgeny Tsyganov‘s young police officer. It is a typical Lysenkov screen part: a sidekick with a sharp profile and quick reactions, standing one step to the side of the lead. At home a far larger audience knows his face as Larion, the twitch-nosed henchman of the family blockbuster Cheburashka.

He was born in Leningrad on 6 July 1982 and grew up there through the hungry, anxious nineties. He remembers going to the next stairwell with other children to look at the bullet holes an automatic burst had left in a lift. He trained at the Saint Petersburg State Academy of Theatre Arts in the class of Vladislav Pazi and Yuri Butusov, graduating in 2004. From Butusov he kept one lesson above the others, which he summed up for the newspaper Vedomosti as “the main thing is not being indifferent”: if a subject does not move you, do not raise it on stage, because it will not move the audience either.

He was already working at the Lensovet Theatre as a student. At about twenty he played Sarafanov, a lonely ageing musician raising a grown son, in Butusov’s staging of a Vampilov play, with no old-age make-up, only a changed way of moving. Yuri Olesha’s bitter dreamer Kavalerov brought him the Strzhelchik prize for best debut in 2006.

In 2007 he joined the Alexandrinsky Theatre, where the artistic director Valery Fokin trusted him with leading roles. He was Khlestakov in Gogol’s The Government Inspector in 2009 and Hamlet a year later, in a deliberately grotesque version that made the prince a hysterical, powerless play-actor. Arbenin, the jealous gambler of Lermontov’s verse drama, in Fokin’s production built on Vsevolod Meyerhold’s 1917 staging, earned him the Russian Government Prize in Culture in 2017. Svidrigailov in Attila Vidnyánszky’s Crime and Punishment brought the Golden Mask for best supporting actor in 2018. He found Svidrigailov richer than Raskolnikov, a polyphonic character, and he plays such men without pretending to vanish into them. “Honestly, I don’t believe in total transformation,” he said; the demons in the actor go to the role.

That same spring he told the Alexandrinsky he would not renew his contract. In a later interview he cited a gross breach of labour law by the management, including thirty-two days in a row without a day off. To Vedomosti he said only that they had parted ways after almost twelve years. Vidnyánszky asked that he be allowed to keep playing Svidrigailov; the theatre refused. Freelance work followed at once: the title role in The Man from Podolsk for Mikhail Bychkov, Raskolnikov for Konstantin Bogomolov, The Iranian Conference and Living T. at the Theatre of Nations, and a production at the Sovremennik opposite Marina Neyolova. In 2020 he received the Stanislavsky Prize, and that summer he moved with his family to Moscow, because, as he put it, that is where all the work was.

The screen has been less generous, and he says so himself. “I was lucky with directors, but with roles, at least the big ones, not so much,” he told Vedomosti. His film credits include supporting parts in Fyodor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad and the Decembrist epic Union of Salvation. More often he is cast for the same sharp, eccentric physicality that the stage prizes, and that quality ends up in caricature. He played two rat-like henchmen almost in parallel, Larion in Cheburashka and the hunchback Tsvyr in the fantasy series The Last Warrior: Heritage, apparently because the two sets of producers never compared notes. He invented Larion’s sniffing, rodent habits himself, and admits that director Dmitry Dyachenko was a little unhappy that the two rats ended up competing. The part he most regrets losing is the lead in Aleksei Balabanov’s It Doesn’t Hurt Me. There was no audition, only a conversation in Balabanov’s kitchen on Vasilyevsky Island, Balabanov with a broken collarbone, Lysenkov with a broken leg, and it did not go well. The role went to Alexander Yatsenko.

When the right material arrives, the results are plain. In Viktor Shamirov’s series The Big Moment, released in 2021, he carries the lead as Rostislav, an awkward, lonely man in a love story between two couples. It was shot the old way, with long rehearsals and no improvised dialogue, and it found a devoted audience with almost no advertising. The same year he reached the final of the twelfth season of Dancing with the Stars on Rossiya-1, partnered with Olga Nikolaeva. In Mikhail Lockshin’s The Master and Margarita in 2024 he played Latunsky, the critic who hounds the Master, and refused the old advice to look for the good in the villain: for him Latunsky is concentrated meanness, the man whose zeal broke real lives.

The rat came back on 1 January 2026, when Cheburashka 2 opened and passed six billion rubles by February. In 2025 he took the role of Alexei Karenin in Danil Chashchin’s stage version of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and he turned up as a scandal-hungry television reporter in Dmitry Litvinenko’s crime comedy Vasiliy, a part that suited his dislike of television people. In 2026 he appeared in the comedy series Tryoshka. He is married to the actress Maria Zimina, and they have two daughters, Sofia and Alisa.

Next comes Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, Alexander Domogarov Jr.’s new adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers’ snowbound mystery, which reaches Russian cinemas on 28 January 2027 and reunites him with Evgeny Tsyganov, his partner from The Ninth, who plays Inspector Glebsky. It is another ensemble, another supporting part, and another chance to see whether a director will let him off the grey leash.