Interview with actor Yankovsky: “Khabensky is good at chess. Aggressive – in the style of Korchnoi”

I admit I was worried. I always do interviews with athletes, and here was an actor – Ivan Yankovsky, who played the lead role in the movie “Champion of the World”. He doesn’t like to give interviews, as he himself has said many times. And this is despite the fact that now he is one of the main stars in our movie. Recently became actor of the year according to GQ. In general, there were concerns, but a few phrases were enough to realize that he was our man.

– You’re from “Championship”, aren’t you? I’m reading you. It should be a top interview, because I’ve been involved in sports since childhood.

–Right from childhood?
– I was good at soccer and basketball. When I failed in other subjects and my parents punished me, it was important for me to buy a newspaper “Sport-Express” or “Soviet Sport” on my way to school that day. At home I was already studying NBA, NHL, soccer statistics… I was also very interested in tennis. And still is. I believe that sport borders on my profession.

– In what way?
– If I play a role, it’s a long-distance race for me. An Olympic peak to be conquered. It’s motivating. In general, my role model is Kobe Bryant, God rest his soul. For me, he is one of my fathers – in spirit, in attitude.

– How long have you been following Kobe?
– Since the early 2000s, when I first visited Los Angeles. Back then, the Lakers were fighting for another nut. I think the second or third title they took with Shaq and Phil Jackson. When they were still playing New Jersey. I was already starting to get into basketball, falling in love with the beauty of it. People just play ball, but how interesting and colorful it is. The movements are like a dance combined with a battle.

– Have you managed to see NBA games live?
– Once. A couple years ago, Boston and Milwaukee met in the playoffs. I was in New York, took a bus ticket to Boston for $15, saw Milwaukee win, and took the same bus back in the morning. One hunkered down and it was one of my top experiences.

– What did you like?
– The cheering, the mix of Bostonians and Milwaukee fans. Jokes, thrash-talks… Someone was playing well, and one of the fans demanded that the basketball player be drug tested. They call it a drug test. People drank beer, shouted, filmed videos – atmospheric. I haven’t been to a basketball game in Russia yet. I need to get there, because they started signing great players. Farid came from the NBA.

– Did you go to other sports?
– As a kid I liked to go to the Kremlin Cup with my grandfather. I remember the time when Kafelnikov and Safin played. I saw on live TV how Marat won in Australia. I used to play tennis myself, and I still do. I even met Roddick once. I always liked the way he played. Even if he was always losing to Federer. It’s more interesting to empathize with the weaker player. I thought he could stand next to Roger and beat him in the Wimbledon final, but it didn’t happen.

– Soccer?
– I’m for Lokomotiv. I go to both the fan and central stands. I’ve been a fan since the 2002 championship. My grandfather was for Spartak, and my father was for Loko. It’s contagious. I thought that if my dad was a fan, I would be too. He won’t choose bad things. I remember, Lokomotiv needed to win by two goals to qualify for the Champions League group – we finished 3-1 (the return match with Shakhtar Donetsk in the third qualifying round of the Champions League 2003/2004. – Note: “Championship”). I was delighted.

– Now Lokomotiv have a difficult period.
– Yes, it’s frustrating. The Germans came and went, and the team started to fall apart. Although at first I thought the idea was brilliant. Really cool. Rangnick is a name. His clubs used to play attacking soccer. Thought the right vision had arrived, but it didn’t work. Nikolic was much more stable. With him the team united, the result was there. But Dinamo is pleasing. I’m not a fan of this club, but it’s nice to see that young Tyukavin and Zakharyan are growing.

“I dreamed of working for Magic Johnson.”

– How do you absorb so much sport in general?
– I had a son, so my nights often turn out to be sleepless. I can catch the Lakers losing to the Lakers, it’s just a misunderstanding. Then I don’t sleep any more. And there are a lot of interesting sports. UFC, for example. I’m also hooked on American soccer, but I haven’t figured out baseball.

– If you get bored with acting, come work for us.
– I had a dream: to arrive at the Staples Center, which has long since been renamed Crypto.com Arena. Just wait for Magic Johnson and tell him, “I’m ready to work in your front office.”

– For free?
– At first for $500 a week, but with raises. I’d go everywhere with him, watch the players, motivate him, support him. I’d do what I could, even just a little bit, for the good of the team. Like Jonah Hill in The Man Who Changed Everything. Or like Jonah Hill in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” When he came to DiCaprio and asked: “Dude, how much do you make? 70-80 grand? That’s it, I’m calling and saying I work for you.” That’s the idea I had, to just quit everything. You know the game NBA2K?

– Uh, no.
– It’s on the PlayStation. It’s got a “my league” mode. I like to rebuild teams. I can trade players, I can trade someone to get a result, to get a title. That’s what I’m interested in.

– Where did you get such an obsession with sports?
– I do not know, I have not dug into myself. In general, I often visited my grandparents in the USA in the summer. I absorbed the culture there. June is the NBA Finals. Everyone is in uniform, waiting for the game, discussing it: “Today is the game, we have to go home right away”. My relatives have been in the U.S. for a long time, and they have their own families – they sit and worry, and I watched with them. I felt it there and transferred it here. I like watching everything. There’s a kind of excitement. So I take a special pleasure in sports-related movies. Now I’ve made a movie about chess, and now I’m doing a movie about a soccer player.

– Here’s more details.
– The project is called “Home Field”. The theme of new ethics is popular now. The storyline is that the team has made its way from the FNL to the Russian championship, and the head coach is a woman.

– And now let’s talk about “World Champion”. You got into this movie quite late, didn’t you?
– Three weeks before filming. Although back in October 2019 I went to the audition, but realized that the main character is not me. And only in the summer of 2020, I was again offered a role. And I have already starred in the series “Topi” in Belarus. I played a cancer patient, and I had absolutely nothing to do with chess. Plus there was a pandemic, and I was in a country where you know what was going on in the summer of 2020.

– And how did you prepare for the new movie in such an environment?
– Sleepless nights alone maniacally moving the figures. I read the books “100 Great Chess Players” and “In Faraway Baguio”, written by Anatoly Karpov. At the same time I took master classes in chess and watched Garry Kasparov’s lessons in English. I also studied documentaries about Fischer, Tal, Morphy, Anderson, Alekhine and many others.

– You weren’t interested in chess before. How does it feel to cope with such a volume?
– I didn’t understand the abbreviations. 1.e2e4 – what is that? Then somehow I got to grips with the squares, started to realize that these were moves of the pieces. It was addictive. So I starred in a TV series, and at night I studied chess while there were people’s unrest outside. We were in Minsk, but not in the center. I could feel the atmosphere here too, I saw so much with my own eyes.

– Daniil Dubov helped you to prepare for the movie. How did it happen?
– He taught me an amazing thing. He explained that a chess player is also a human being, that you have to take everything more easily. I thought chess was all about moving pieces around assiduously, a wild inner clamp. Dubov dispelled my feeling that chess was like an invisible arm-wrestling match. Daniil is quite light in his own right. Saw a picture of him sitting in Balenciaga. The eyes are alien. I decided that this man would help me prepare.

– Who arranged the meeting?
– I wrote him a message on Instagram something like, “Good afternoon, Daniil. I’m going to play Anatoly Karpov. Could you please initiate me into your community…”. As a result, we met in a bar, he ordered an awesome-looking cocktail and told me a lot of things.

– Did you play with Dubov yourself?
– Yes. He won in about three seconds. We became friends, we started meeting in the afternoon, and it was too late to leave by cab.

– Are you aware that Dubov has been caught up in a major chess scandal lately?
– You mean the fact that he was helping Carlsen? They’ve been friends for a long time. Dubov mentioned it when we talked to each other. So they practiced, so what? People just needed something to hold on to. I think it’s unreasonable. It’s better to ask Dubov, but he really helped me. We had Mikhail Troynik with us, who played Balashov. He was also consulted by Grischuk. Plus Dmitry Oleinik (curator of the chess museum in Moscow) explained to me what a closed variant of the “Spanish” was, and what an open variant was, Alekhine’s defense, Morphy’s aggressive play….

– Why was it necessary to immerse myself so much?
– I wondered. Anatoly Karpov knew all this, and I wanted to avoid embarrassment. It’s a huge responsibility to play a man we all know.

– Did you see him before you played him?
– Yes, we met at the studio office. The main thing for me was to get his blessing, to hug him, to hold his hands – to feel that he believes in me. After the premiere, he was delighted and said nice words. His wife came up and said a lot of compliments. I was flattered.

– What advice did he give you before the shoot?
– He explained that it’s important for a chess player to keep his inner core. To remain a wall that no factor can move. I took notes after him. He also showed me a move he used to push a rook down the flank. It would slide and knock down the piece he was taking. I wanted to use this technique in the movie, but I could not repeat it as gracefully and charmingly.

“I was just sucked dry mentally. It was hard to even talk, let alone play someone.”

– Grandmasters make a huge number of moves in a career. It’s impossible to perfect moves in a few weeks.
– I thought about that a lot. I just wanted you to see, when you watch the movie, that I’ve been playing chess all my life. I had that feeling when I touched the clock without looking at it, ate pieces, wrote down moves… At the same time I took the knight this way, moved the pawn differently, and I moved the queen in the third move. Karpov played more gently, while Korchnoi played sharply. Bobby Fischer was very aggressive in this respect. I saw one program where he was asked to simulate a game with Spassky. Bam! Bam!!! The pieces just flew off.

– You said it was important for you to convey Karpov’s gaze?
– Yes. I saw a documentary. He has this cold, aloof, fishy look. You could drown or freeze there. I wanted to convey that – if I’m watching, you’ll be cold and scared. I tried to be in a state of being cut off from reality and living in a world of 64 cells. You say the wrong thing to me, it’s that look. A cold, calculating killer. Not with a knife, but behind a board. Yes, at one point bright, vulnerable and kind, but at the same time stubborn in terms of sporting interest.

– You got sick with covida during filming.
– We had to cut it short. We had filmed everything but the game. I was out for a couple weeks. At that moment the series “The Queen’s Move” came out, which I watched with pleasure. Plus I studied the games themselves. Not everything went into the movie. At the same time, we didn’t have a single extra move – everything was strictly according to the real games. For example, the first game lasted 18 moves on each side, and we filmed one shot. When there were 60 moves, it was impossible to memorize so many, of course. Konstantin Yurievich and I made moves from ourselves when there was a reshuffle.

– You just so played with Khabensky at pauses during filming?
– Yes. He’s good at chess. He acts aggressively – just in the manner of Korchnoi. He beat me both times, but the third time I was in good shape and managed to discourage him, took his queen, but we were interrupted. I could see that he wasn’t happy.

– You had a nervous breakdown during the filming. Why?
– It’s hard to do two pictures at once. Of course, if it is not just some pastime for you: you learned the text, said on camera, and then coffee, a cigarette and went to chat on the phone. That’s not the method I’ve chosen for myself in my profession. You can’t be distracted by things that take you out of the process. Especially when it’s such different material. There’s one person in “The Stomp” and the next day you’re playing a completely different person in “World Champion.” The mindset is exciting, but it’s important not to carry it from court to court.

– At what point did you have a nervous breakdown?
– During one of the scenes with Viktor Sukhorukov. I was just sucked out morally. It was hard to even talk, let alone play someone else. Already lost myself at some point. I didn’t realize, who was I, anyway? Vanya, where are you? I’m self-critical about my work, but in this movie I’m satisfied with many moments, because I don’t see myself there. Through my own circumstances I glued myself together with the same nervous state that Karpov had during the match.

– It was a lucky coincidence.
– You know what really coincided? Karpov came up to me after the premiere and said: “Ivan, you know, I once gave chess to your grandfather…”. I interrupted him and replied: “Yes! My grandmother gave me this very chess set – on my birthday after the filming was over.” He was shocked. Imagine, a gift to Oleg Ivanovich back in the 80s or 90s. Karpov’s famous chess set. There are unusual pieces, ivory, a heavy board – a rare collector’s edition, like a painting in a museum. And these chess pieces magically passed to me. That’s when I realized that everything had worked out.