You're reading: From breakfast show to world fame

He made Hollywood nice-guy actor Will Smith lose his temper. He gave goat milk to singer Kylie Minogue in public. He tricked Bill Clinton’s bodyguards, allowing him to get close enough to pose questions to the former U.S. president. Vitalii Sediuk, who works for 1+1 TV station’s breakfast show, is something like Ukraine’s Borat.

Sediuk has been grabbing international attention for playing tricks on celebrities for less than a year since he gave a hydrangea to Madonna last September in Cannes. She put the flower down, hissing “I absolutely loathe hydrangeas.”

He got a lot of sympathetic press then, and Madonna was accused of treating a journalist badly. She felt so strongly about the incident that she even released a video on Youtube later, in which, instead of an apology, she says: “It’s a free country! So f**k you, I like roses!”

Sediuk says his job as an infotainment reporter is all about getting a reaction, preferably an unusual one. He seems to manage it well.

Trained in martial arts, he has been doing infotainment for nearly two years, while studying at the same time. He graduated last month, at the age of 23.

Sediuk originally developed his provocative style of reporting while doing an “English for Euro-2012 series” for his TV show. He pretended to be a foreigner and approached medical and police workers with questions, testing their English skills.

He then moved on to reporting celebrities, and Pamela Anderson was his first. After Anderson came  Minogue, whom he gave a bottle of goat milk he knew she likes. Then came Bill Clinton, whom Sediuk caught surrounded by bodyguards during his visit to Kyiv. He managed to trick the bodyguards, and got to interview Clinton.

“It is nearly impossible to arrange an interview with a world celebrity,” Sediuk says. “They won’t just talk to some random reporter from Ukraine. So you go to the red carpet and try to ask your questions while being pushed away by the guards. But I enjoy it even more than having a regular interview.”

Because of this style of reporting, Los Angeles Times recently compared Sediuk to Borat, a brash imaginary character created by the British comic Sacha Baron Cohen.

Yet Sediuk claims he has no idea who Borat is. “I definitely need to watch it, now that everyone compares me to Borat,” he says, grinning.

L.A. Times last month reported the incident with Will Smith in Moscow, when he slapped Sediuk, thinking the reporter was about to kiss him on the mouth. Sediuk caught the actor coming to the premiere of “Men in Black 3,” first hugging him and then apparently trying to plant a kiss.

Smith reacted with a slap and was heard saying  “Hey, man, what the hell is your problem, buddy?”
The Ukrainian was accused of being rude, but he says he didn’t mean to be.  “I’ve heard that he was sort of upset after that,” Sediuk says. “I didn’t plan that kiss. The only thing I planned was my looks. I thought everyone’s going to wear black for  the “Men In Black” premiere and wore a white suit to be noticed.”

Sediuk, who actually seems like a genuinely nice guy, says he apologized to Smith in his interview with CBS channel because he “understands that he crossed a line and intruded into personal space.”

Organizers kicked him out of the premiere after the attempted kiss, and wanted to take the tape away. But he and his cameraman found another way out and kept the recording. He was then approached by a Russian reporter, who asked whether he was going to sue Smith for the slap.

“I was like ‘no, no’, and the first minute I got into the train [back to Kyiv],  I called my mother and told her  to pay no attention to any strange things that she may hear about me,” the reporter recalls.

“Those couple weeks were crazy,” he says, sitting cozily in a Kyiv coffee shop. He just returned from Hollywood, where he was flown to give three interviews about the incident.

Sediuk is now planning to meet  Selena Gomez, Sheryl Crow and Madonna – again. The pop queen is coming to Kyiv to give a concert in August.

Sediuk says he has already heard, unofficially, that he is persona non-grata at Madonna’s Ukrainian press events. That won’t stop him, though. He wants some tete-a-tete with the diva, and is thinking what kind of flowers he should be giving her.

“Giving her roses that she likes is a bit ordinary,” he says. And ordinary just does not seem to go with him.

Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected]