After portraying a Pope, King Vortigern and Henry VIII, the British actor Jude Law is no stranger to walking in the shoes of formidable figures.
But his upcoming project will be “an Everest to climb”, he has said, as he prepares to play President Putin.
The film, The Wizard of the Kremlin, is based on an acclaimed novel of the same name by Giuliano da Empoli, an Italian-French writer.
It revolves around a fictional character named Vladimir Baranov, whose character is based on Vladislav Surkov, a notorious former Kremlin spin doctor who helped Putin to cement his hold on power in the 2000s.
“It looks like an Everest to climb, so I’m in the foothills looking up thinking, ‘Oh Christ,’” Law said in January when asked about the role by Deadline, the film news website.
On-set photographs of Law as Putin have emerged showing him wearing a black coat over a suit and a yellow tie, with actors who appear to be playing members of an Arab delegation.
“What I love now is being offered or challenged or being able to develop roles that take me further from myself than ever before whether it’s physically or emotionally,” Law said. “And that seems to be readily available as I get older.”
The Wizard of the Kremlin is directed by Olivier Assayas, who is best known for Personal Shopper, which won him the best director award at Cannes in 2016. He also directed the critically acclaimed television series Irma Vep.
Baranov will be played by Paul Dano, who appeared in There Will Be Blood and 12 Years a Slave, while Alicia Vikander, the Academy award-winning Swedish actress, will play his lover, Ksenia. Zach Galifianakis and Tom Sturridge have also been cast in unspecified roles.
Da Empoli’s novel was first published in France as Le Mage du Kremlin, and quickly became a bestseller. Admirers hailed what they said were its invaluable insights into Putin’s political thinking and the inner workings of his regime.
• The author who went inside Putin’s mind — and wrote a bestseller
The book has also been well received in Moscow, where Channel One, Russia’s main television station, said its view of the Kremlin was “quite friendly”.
However, critics said it was inaccurate and simplistic. “[It is] poorly constructed, filled with two-dimensional characters, tin-eared dialogue and inauthentic settings,” Owen Matthews, a former Moscow correspondent for Newsweek, wrote in The Spectator.
Surkov was the architect of Putin’s “sovereign democracy”, a tightly controlled political system that forbids all genuine opposition while providing the masses with the illusion of free elections.
Besides politics, Surkov also dabbled in the arts. He wrote a satirical novel, Almost Zero, and penned lyrics for a well-known Russian rock group. An opposition politician once described him as “the lord of darkness”. He was a personal adviser to Putin until 2020. He disputed reports that he had been dismissed, saying he had left the post of his own accord.
The Wizard of the Kremlin comes shortly after the release of Putin, a film by the polish director Patryk Vega. It uses AI technology to superimpose the face of Putin onto an actor and portrays the Russian leader working as a taxi driver after the collapse of the Soviet Union, cheating on his wife and ordering political assassinations.
