Filed Under: Video > Journalism > A 1997 interview with Sergei Bodrov, Jr. (1971-2002)

A 1997 interview with Sergei Bodrov, Jr. (1971-2002)

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By the late 1990s, the actor Sergei Bodrov, Jr. (1971-2002), who played the lovable gangster “Danila Bagrov” in Aleksei Balabanov’s (1959-2002) films Brother (1997) and Brother 2 (2000), had become a movie star of national renown. In both films, Balabanov constructs Danila as a charmingly guileless, recently demobilized veteran of the First Chechen War. As an undeterred and masterful killer with a strict moral code, Danila became both an enduring cultural icon and an exponent of post-Soviet racism, xenophobia, and neo-imperialism. 
 
This interview was recorded after the release of the first Brother film, a surprise hit with younger audiences. In describing post-Soviet youth, who consider his character Danila a national hero, Bodrov, Jr. refers to them as patriotic—in his opinion, not the most dangerous phenomenon (“Is loving your country really such a bad thing?”). In fact, Bodrov, Jr. here publicly applauds those among the Russian youth who love their country. However much fans may wish to identify the actor with his character, the socioeconomic chasm between Bodrov, Jr. and the fictional Danila is vast. Compared to Danila, a fatherless son from a troubled provincial family, Bodrov, Jr. is highly privileged: his father, Sergei Bodrov (1948-), is a film director and a member of the Russian intelligentsia; Bodrov, Jr. has recently finished his PhD dissertation on Venetian painting; and he is sophisticated and well-traveled. Despite these distinctions, Bodrov, Jr. is celebrated almost exclusively for his portrayal of Danila, whose fictional personality is attributed to the actor. This type of semiotic and semantic misalignment is a key feature of Bodrov’s celebrity and can be observed more generally in other mass-cultural constructions of post-Soviet masculinity, as, for example, in the “tough guy” stage image of Sergei “Shnur” Shnurov (1973-), the leader of the popular band Leningrad. 
 
Bodrov’s untimely death in 2002, in an ice slide at the Kolka Glacier while filming his unfinished project, The Messenger, cemented the actor’s status as a youth idol. He seemed, in retrospect, like yet another martyred voice of a generation, similar to late-Soviet rock star Viktor Tsoi (1962-1990). In the decades following his death, Bodrov, Jr. earned the moniker “The Brother of all Russia” (Brat vsei Rossii), with numerous monuments and memorials constructed in his honor. The post-Soviet cult of Bodrov, Jr. celebrates the values and attitudes of his character Danila—a Russian patriot who loves his country, derides foreign influence, is unfailingly loyal, and possesses decisiveness of mind and physical strength, all while unapologetically maintaining his vocation as a cold-blooded killer. 
 
The dichotomy of patriotic steadfastness and criminal transgression that Bodrov Jr. personifies became a useful political tool during the Putin era. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, several of Danila’s lines from Brother and Brother 2 were co-opted by Russian government propaganda to legitimize and justify the war to the Russian population.