On June 29, 1974, the shooting star of the Soviet Union’s prestigious Kirov Ballet was on a foreign tour in Canada. After completing a performance in Toronto, the 26-year-old ran, jumped into a car, and said do svidaniya to his home country forever. A month later, he made his New York debut, as Albrecht in Giselle. The world’s most discerning audience for classical dance bent the knee to a phenomenon named Mikhail Baryshnikov.
“I actually didn’t grow up going to the ballet a lot,” says Anna Baryshnikov, Mikhail’s daughter with the dancer Lisa Rinehart. “I think that’s probably why I never aspired to do it myself.”
And yet, her career of choice isn’t that far off. At 33, Baryshnikov is playing the lead role in Idiotka, an indie film out next week, starring Julia Fox and Gen Z favorites Benito Skinner and Owen Thiele. Directed by Nastasya Popov, it’s a take on the American Dream that follows a scrappy designer from West Hollywood’s Russian district who is hoping to get her big break by competing in a Project Runway–type reality show. “It was just always, always, always what she wanted to do,” Baryshnikov recently overheard her parents telling friends about her acting.
Raised in Rockland County, less than an hour’s drive from New York, she recalls a childhood spent “barefoot,” playing in her friends’ yards and in the local church’s children’s Shakespeare Theater. “I did my first play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with them when I was six,” she says, “and then I just started saying I was an actress. It’s the first thing I knew about myself.”
Baryshnikov began auditioning professionally at 16, landing her first role in a Staples commercial, followed by one for Febreze. (Years later, at a college party, her friends projected the latter onto a wall to “lovingly torture” her.)
Despite those jobs and the high-school stage productions she appeared in, Baryshnikov felt “petrified” and unprepared to pursue acting seriously. “Having a parent who’s so high-achieving in the arts, I was very aware that I was lacking training,” she explains.
Adding insult to injury, when she did get her first film role, in Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse, starring Christopher Walken, her scene was cut. (Solondz sent her a “very sweet note” pointing out the many successful actors whose first scenes had met the same fate in the editing room.) “I had no illusions that it was going to be easy. I knew that a lot of it was going to be crying in Midtown,” she says, referring to where many of her auditions take place.
Determined to hone her craft, Baryshnikov did something most young actors don’t: go to college. She graduated from Northwestern in 2014 with a degree in theater, a handful of Slavic-studies electives under her belt, and a deep admiration for the alums of Chicago’s storied theater scene, which include Carrie Coon and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. “For a while, I was nervous I had made the wrong decision,” she says about her formal training, noticing how many young actors had started their careers far before their 20s. “But then I hit the ground running.”
She moved to Brooklyn and started attending back-to-back auditions. Then, on a late night in 2016, she received a call. “They wanted me to come to rehearsal,” she says. “I walked into the room and there was Michelle Williams.” Baryshnikov landed the role of Sandy, a bandmate and the love interest of Lucas Hedges’s Patrick in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. “It was the best big job I could have hoped for.”
A slew of supporting roles followed: The Kindergarten Teacher, Josie & Jack, and Love Lies Bleeding. But in 2023, somewhere between austere casting rooms and endless self-tapes, arrived Idiotka. To prepare for her role, Baryshnikov took sewing classes in the Garment District and read Vivienne Westwood’s 2014 memoir. She’d never learned Russian, given her father’s defection, so she often found herself asking her Russian co-stars how to pronounce certain words. The film’s poignant immigrant subtext struck a personal chord, reminding her of roots that had only silently shaped her: “It was always delightful when I would discover that something about the way I grew up was actually kind of a Slavic quality, when I’d just thought it was just a quirk about my family.”
Shooting took place in Popov’s grandmother’s house in Fairfax, a Russian-immigrant hub in Los Angeles, and lasted 20 days. “It was the best month of my life,” says Baryshnikov. The palette of the film is saturated and candy-colored, reminiscent of Jacques Demy’s 1964 film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The script, written by Popov, channels a distinctly Gen Z humor—frantic and absurd—rooted in the new “messy 20s” genre seen in recent TV series like Adults, Skinner’s Overcompensating, and Lena Dunham’s Too Much.
As for what’s next, Baryshnikov is at the very beginning of a busy year, with cameos in The Drama, starring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya; Sender, starring Britt Lower; and a TV adaptation of the 1990s film remake of Cape Fear, with Javier Bardem and Amy Adams. But Idiotka, she says, stands apart. “It was so special and almost didn’t feel like a job. It was like a different life experience.”
Idiotka will be released in theaters on February 27, before becoming available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video in March
Carolina de Armas is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
