Biography

Maksim Emelyanov was born on May 13, 1990 in Moscow, RSFSR, USSR. He is an actor, known for The Blackout (2019), The Ultimate Planet (2026) and Dead Mountain (2020).

Also a trained stage actor.

[on Michel Hazanavicius] Not only is Michel a terrific director, he is also very gentle man. In Russia, directors often shout at actors. Michel gets what he wants by other means. I was also very happy that we could do many takes. Up until now, on the Russian films I've worked on, we rehearsed then did three takes, no more.

[on preparing for The Search (2014)] I looked at a lot of documentation about Chechnya and Afghanistan on the Internet. I tried to meet people who had lived through these conflicts. I underwent an intense 2-month training in order to build muscle mass and gained eight kilos. And I imagined Kolia's story: I didn't tell anyone about it but I had to understand him and why he does what he does... For me, Kolia is a boy who lived alone with his mother and who was teased a lot... This situation is more and more common in Russia: you find boys in boarding schools calling their teacher 'Mummy'. I went through the same thing. I completely understand Kolia's pain.

[on being cast in The Search (2014)] Tatiyana Kliminskaya, an excellent casting director, called my agent to tell her a French director was looking for Russian actors. We didn't know who the director was at that point, or what kind of film it would be, just that it was a big project. The casting took place in four stages and I only met Michel Hazanavicius during the fourth. It's almost a miracle for me to have been associated with such an ambitious project. I felt as if I was taking my first step towards the European market.

[on his character in The Search (2014)] Kolia is an ordinary boy who falls into the hell of war. For me, the best way to define him is to invert the popular metaphor: Kolia is not a caterpillar turning into a butterfly but a butterfly that turns into a caterpillar. That is the effect war has on him. At the beginning Kolia is like a flying butterfly, he knows how to be happy at any moment, every day. By the end he is the opposite, incapable of any true happiness, crawling like a caterpillar.