- Share this article on Facebook
- Share this article on Twitter
- Share this article on Flipboard
- Share this article on Email
- Show additional share options
- Share this article on Linkedin
- Share this article on Pinit
- Share this article on Reddit
- Share this article on Tumblr
- Share this article on Whatsapp
- Share this article on Print
- Share this article on Comment
Gerard Depardieu, who obtained a Russian citizenship and a residency in Mordovia’s capital Saransk earlier this year, is going to star in two films set in the North Caucasus republic of Chechnya.
This month, the filming of Turquoise, directed by Philippe Martinez, is to begin in Grozny — Chechnya’s capital city — and Moscow. In the action thriller, Depardieu is to star alongside British actress Elizabeth Hurley. She has already arrived in Moscow. “A good day meeting the French and Russian crew on the new movie, ‘Turquoise,’” she said on her Twitter account on May 16.
STORY: Gerard Depardieu Registers Residency in Russia
Depardieu is to play a former gangster, and Hurley’s character will be his lover.
The other film, Serdtse Otsa (A Father’s Heart), is to be centered on the reconstruction of Chechnya following two wars which the then breakaway republic had with Russia in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.
The project was first mentioned last February when the actor visited the republic and met with its authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Depardieu said he wanted to make a film in Chechnya, and Kadyrov gave him a five-room apartment in Grozny.
Earlier this week, Le Monde reported that in the movie, Depardieu will play Chechnya’s former president Akhmat Kadyrov, Ramzan’s father, assassinated by Islamic terrorists in Grozny in 2004.
Later, that information was denied by Depardieu’s friend Nikolai Borodachev, director of the state film archive Gosfilmfond. “This is a totally different story, more like an action thriller,” he was quoted as saying by the Russian daily Izvestia. “Depardieu will be playing a positive Chechen character.”
In the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chechnya broke away from Russia. The two countries then had two wars, ruled largely by Islamists. After the second one, Chechnya was brought back to Russia as a Russian republic.
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day