Actor Dmitry Mulyar named his most valuable roles

Dmitry played the main role in “The Teenager” and Alyosha Karamazov in “The Brothers Karamazov” after Dostoevsky, Fyodor Godunov in “Boris Godunov”, Onegin in “Eugene Onegin”, Maksudov in “Theatrical Novel” … The film career began in the same 1994 with the film The Hammer and Sickle by Sergei Livnev.

We met in 2005 at the Literature and Cinema festival in Gatchina. There, Dmitry received an award for the best male role for two films at once: “Ragin” by Kirill Serebrennikov based on Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6” and “The Golden Head on the Block” by Semyon Ryabikov, where he played Sergei Yesenin. Since then, he has acted in more than 100 films. These are “Insight” and “Spitak” by Alexander Kott, “Once in Rostov” by Konstantin Khudyakov, “The Head of a Classic” by Valery Lonsky, “Doctor Zhivago” by Alexander Proshkin, “In the First Circle” by Gleb Panfilov, “Once upon a time there was a woman” by Andrey Smirnov , “A bag without a bottom” by Rustam Khamdamov, where he was a spiritualized mushroom, “Unprincipled” by Roman Prygunov, “Survivors” by Andrey Proshkin, “Icebreaker” by Nikolai Khomeriki … He had the main roles and vivid episodes, dozens of policemen and employees of the NKVD and KGB, men in uniform, the main character in the mini-series “How to Marry a Plumber”, which says that we have not had such plumbers yet. Dmitry played Emelyan Pugachev in “The Empress and the Robber” by Ekaterina Toldonova, in “Space as a Premonition” by Alexei Uchitel and in the docudrama “Our Cosmos” by Yuri Gagarin, whom he was surprisingly similar to.

– After they announced that you had been awarded the title, colleagues came up with the words: “Well, finally.” Is the process taking too long?

Everyone wanted it to happen and for it to happen to them too. They also told me: “I thought you were well-deserved for a long time.”

– You studied with Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov, then came to his theater. Do you have a special relationship?

“Probably special. He loved me, although I left the third year for academic reasons. Our entire course ended up in the Taganka Theater, but I didn’t. I came to the theater when Yuri Petrovich was abroad. The head of the troupe knew that he somehow singled me out, told him that I had stopped by. Lyubimov told her: “Take it.” So I ended up in the theatre.

– So you didn’t harbor any grudges?

— No, if you’re talking about leaving the course. Yuri Petrovich had a special position regarding graduation performances. He believed that they were not needed, let students be introduced to the theater repertoire and defend their diplomas there. And I dreamed about how I would play at the school, and this was the reason for my departure from the course. The theater was then single, with two stages, but no one, of course, was waiting for us there. Lyubimov recruited us, he visited us twice a year. We showed him excerpts. With Yuri Petrovich it was very interesting from a professional point of view and humanly comfortable. He wanted to renew the troupe, inject young blood into it, gave instructions and left. Nobody did it without him. Yes, and it was too early to introduce us into performances with professional actors. This required better preparation. Several people eventually left to do graduation performances, which was stupid from the point of view of further employment. At that moment, the theater was divided, and it was necessary to plug the holes that had formed due to the departure of the actors to Nikolai Gubenko. When Yuri Petrovich came, we were working on “Teenager”. He staged it in Finland and wanted to do something similar in Moscow. He gave assignments to stretch the material, and we did this for a couple of years, making some excerpts. Lyubimov came, looked, he did not like much. And I really wanted to participate in this, and I asked for a staging for the night. There was no copier then, but the text had to be rewritten somehow. I had a novel by Dostoevsky, and right in the book I underlined with a pencil what was included in the dramatization. While we finished our studies, there was a search for the lead actor. We worked out the material for several months without Lyubimov, and then I played the Teenager – Arkady Dolgorukov. It was my debut role.

– Was your course the only one Lyubimov had after his return to his homeland?

– He also had a musical at GITIS. And we were the first course he took. Except for the very first one – 1964, but it was not even his course, he simply staged The Good Man from Sezuan there, from which the Taganka Theater began.

— What awaits you in the new theatrical season?

— I am rehearsing Antonio in Le nozze di Figaro with director Denis Bakuradze. Last season we released “104 Pages About Love” based on the play by Edvard Radzinsky, and this performance opened the current season. I haven’t released anything for a long time, and it was interesting for me to play four roles at once in one performance. There were even five of them at first. All of them are small and different – Semyonov, Evdokimov’s stepfather, Cheerful citizen with a dahlia, Zookeeper. I loved each character, found something special in him. I play them using different theatrical elements, with speech and plastic features. A special drive is that you need to quickly change clothes and go on stage completely different, so that the audience sometimes does not understand that they are facing the same actor.

– This is not your only performance?

— I play the Master in The Master and Margarita.

“Not a lot for an artist like you. So cinema is the most important of the arts for you?

– One complements the other. In the theater everything is slower, more detailed, in the cinema everything is faster. I have an interesting and funny role in the new season of “Cipher” by Vera Storozheva, which was filmed in Kislovodsk. I got great pleasure both from the material and from working with Vera Mikhailovna. She is a smart and professional director with a great sense of humor. It’s easy with her. My hero was not in the previous series. This is a new character. He is the chief of militia, the provincial head of Kislovodsk. Suddenly, some women, employees of the GRU special department, come to his city to investigate a complex crime. And he, an experienced man who went through the war, begins to suspect that they came to dig under him. On the one hand, he is the boss to whom everyone obeys, and on the other hand, visiting young ladies awe him. It infuriates him that they, in his opinion, understand little of anything. A serious and courageous person finds himself in a comical situation. When we read the script, we choked with laughter.

(While we are talking, Denis Mulyar comes into the dressing room and wishes his brother a good performance.)

“This is my brother,” Dmitry says.

– It is surprising that in your family two brothers went on the acting path at once. There are few such examples.

Why? What about the Solomon brothers?

— The Ilyina brothers, the Kutepov sisters… You can name a few more names, but you can count them on your fingers. You lived in the small town of Karachev near Bryansk, where there was no theater. How did you get into the acting profession?

– For Denis, it probably mattered that I chose this particular profession. A bad example is contagious. Denis is a very good actor.

Denis followed his older brother. And what did you dream about?

– I had a vague idea about the acting profession, and that was thanks to the movies that could be seen in the cinema and on TV. I didn’t know much about theater. When I decided to enter, I visited the theater in Bryansk a couple of times. Apparently, there was some vague desire to live the lives of other people.

– You are brothers, but texture is very different.

We are different, but our voices are constantly confused. We have a seven year age difference. Denis worked for Nikolai Gubenko in the “Commonwealth of Taganka Actors” before the amalgamation of theaters. I haven’t been going there often lately, so when I saw the roles that Denis had already played with us (the Pilot in The Good Man from Sezuan), I was pleasantly surprised by such a quality of performance with an urgent input. He will have a number of curious laboratory performances. Be sure to come to “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” by Leskov, where Denis is incredible. In seven days, small pieces were made, and this is such a powerful combination of shape, eccentrics, depth! Denis is very good there.

– You did not encounter on the site or on the stage?

– Not yet. Somehow they started rehearsing together, but I got sick, and everything happened without me. Denis worked for Gubenko for many years, and here, since the merger, for about two years. He has been acting in Cipher since the first season, but we didn’t work together on the set.

– Has the demand for you changed in today’s age and professional category?

– If you face the truth, then everything is tied to age. Now they will no longer offer the role of thirty-year-old heroes. Unexpected offers arise, although there are far fewer roles in my category than roles of young heroes.

— What is your rhythm of life? Do you have to wait or break more often?

The rhythm is always uneven. First you wait, and then several roles fall on you at the same time, so you have to quickly run. Then you wait again. When you run, you regret that there is no opportunity to sit down and think. And when you sit and think, you start to miss the fast pace. I don’t really like to talk about projects that haven’t taken place yet. It’s a bad omen to talk aloud about something that doesn’t exist yet. It’s better not to. Suddenly it won’t work.

Cinema and theater don’t give you much. You are capable of more.

– Agree. There are some failed things, but the circumstances are different.

– After filming the film “Space as a Premonition” by Alexei Uchitel, were there any other offers to play Gagarin?

– There was a foreign proposal, but the work never came to fruition. We also filmed something about Gagarin, but by that time I had already grown up. So everything was limited to the film by Alexei Uchitel. Gagarin has a very interesting twist of fate. In my opinion, in America, after his flight into space, an article was published with something like this title – “A man who has everything behind.” And Gagarin was then 27 years old. Whole life ahead. He really wanted to fly, but he was kept in reserve. When Komarov died, and he was his understudy, they made the final decision that Gagarin would no longer fly. Such an outbreak, a risk at the very beginning, and then endless trips around the world. And what he was looking for never happened. Perhaps this circumstance was the reason for his early departure. There is enough material for a big film about Gagarin, but such a picture has not yet been made.

– Which of the last roles were especially valuable for you?

– The role in Cipher was interesting, and it was solved in a humorous way. Large and serious work in the films “Alex Fierce” and “Decembrist”, where I played a lawyer who was denounced in the camp. He goes from a very successful person, accustomed to comfort to a life in completely different conditions. My hero is released as a completely different person. His wife rescues him by hook or by crook, or rather by crooks, and this is a whole saga of ten episodes with fundamental changes in a person.

– You are either a victim of the camps, or a policeman, an employee of the NKVD or the KGB, a man in uniform. Doesn’t it bother you?

– A certain label sticks to the cinema, and actors are used in the capacity in which they were once seen. But I have both completely villainous roles and positive ones. Filming of the children’s film “Everyone Dreams of a Dog” by Olga Belyaeva, based on the story by Vladimir Zheleznikov, the author of “Scarecrow”, will soon begin. There I have the role of a father. He is no longer in the world, but he appears in the memories of a little son when some important issue needs to be resolved. It’s like talking to a dead father. I hope it will be an interesting role.