You're reading: Actor Gregory Hlady: ‘I am better Ukrainian in Canada than here’

When Ukrainian actor Gregory Hlady sits down for breakfast in his hotel in downtown Kyiv, he finds himself speaking English with the staff.

“Tea, please,” he asks the waitress, his Slavic accent barely detectible.

The waitress didn’t realize that she was speaking not only with a Montreal, Canada-based actor and director, but also with Roman Shukhevych and Major Morozov, two of Hlady’s most famous roles in Ukrainian and Russian productions.

Hlady moved to Canada in early 1990s. The 56-year-old built a successful career there playing bad-guy characters in Canadian and Hollywood movies, and has also directed theatrical productions of Kafka, Brecht, Bulgakov and Dostoyevsky.

He has also appeared as Roman Shukhevych, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army leader, in the 2000 movie “Undefeated” by Oles Yanchuk and Major Morozov in the Russian criminal TV series of the same name in 2007.

Hlady said he has mixed feelings when in Ukraine as a person who is visiting his homeland, but at the same time a tourist. While walking on Kyiv’s streets, meeting friends and colleagues, he said he felt it is still better for him to live abroad.

Gregory Hlady plays bad guys in Hollywood and directs theater plays in Canada.

“Looking at the total disharmony in the society I believe I am in a better situation not living here,” he said.

Wearing hemp jeans and a T-shirt, he comes through as a romantic philosopher unburdened by luxuries his profession can offer.

“It seems to me that I am a better Ukrainian in Canada than I would be here,” he adds.

Hlady was back in Ukraine as a jury member at the third Kyiv International Film Festival. Born in western Ukraine, he moved to Kyiv to study and graduated from Karpenko-Kary Theater Institute in 1976 and became an actor at the newly founded Molody, or Young, Theater.

Hlady was chosen to play the main part in Pedro Calderon’s play “The Constant Prince” in 1981, of a Portuguese prince who sacrificed his life in the name of the national interests.

Gregory Hlady plays the lead part of a writer in the “The Ugly Swans,” the 2005 French-Russian film. (ruskino.ru)

Soviet authorities banned the production, because it highlighted patriotic struggle, which ran afoul with the Soviet effort to unite 15 member states into one union. Hlady decided to leave the country.

He first moved to Kaunas in Lithuania and worked with Lithuanian director Jonas Vaitkus.

Then he worked in Moscow with famous Russian director Anatoly Vasiliev. In 1990, however, a contract in Vasiliev’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author” took him to Canada.

Soon he became a director himself and won the Quebec Theater Critics’Award for best directing for his production of Harold Pinter’s play “The Homecoming” in the 1991-2 season.

Hlady speaks several foreign languages and with versatile skills as an actor and a director, he quickly found his home in the Canadian city of Montreal.

“Canada is an open, multicultural and multinational country,” he says. “It became a kind of a shelter for me, and I became a citizen of Canada.”

While in Canada, he says, he can devote himself to art, to work with his subconscious and not have to think how to survive, in contrast to many artists in Ukraine. An actor in Montreal is paid on average $350-500 for each performance; a Ukrainian actor would earn as much for an entire month on stage.

But he hasn’t left his homeland behind completely.

It seems to me that I am a better Ukrainian in Canada than I would be here.

– Gregory Hlady, ukrainian actor

“There is always a Ukrainian element in my work, even if it is not visible from the first glance,” he says.

In the 1994 version of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist drama “Exit the King,” director Hlady made all his actors sing Ukrainian church songs.

While directing the 1995 performance “America,” based on a Franz Kafka novel, Hlady used elements of the traditional Ukrainian men’s dance, the hopak.

As a director of the 2006 French-Canadian musical “Dracula: Between Love and Death,” he taught Canadian singer Bruno Pelletier to sing the Ukrainian folk song “Tsvite Teren,” or “Flowering thistle.” The action took place in Transylvania, modern Romania, close to the Carpathian Mountains that span over to Ukraine.

“If I was Romanian, then Romanian culture would be more apparent in my performance,” Hlady explains. “Since I was born on the opposite side of the Carpathians, I taught the Canadian to sing in Ukrainian.”

Hlady is currently working on a performance with Montreal circus Eloize. It will be an experimental production of Franz Kafka’s novel “Castle,” which will combine modern theater and circus elements such as acrobatics and juggling. Hlady hopes to bring this production to Kyiv next year.

“I come to Ukraine at least once a year,” he says. “It is very important for me.”

When in Ukraine Hlady visits his mother who lives in Khorostkiv and his brother, a Greek-Catholic priest in Lviv. His daughter Yevheniya Hlady, also an actress, lives in Kyiv. The young actress was invited recently to act at the Russian theater in Vilnius.

“She has to go to Lithuania now, she is following her dad’s steps,” Hlady says, adding that he hopes she will be able to come to live and work in Canada one day.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Faryna can be reached at [email protected]