Western films, books, TV shows with notable Ukrainian portrayals

Ukraine is a big part of the European continent, but still mostly terra incognita to the Western entertainment industry. Good luck finding a mainstream movie set in Ukraine — Autobots never fight Megatron on the streets of Kyiv in a “Transformers” movie. Julia Roberts didn’t go to Odesa in “Eat Pray Love.”

Still, the rarity of Ukrainian appearances in Western popular culture makes it more entertaining when the occasional Ukrainian character turns up in a U.S. television show, movie or book.

Here are some memorable Ukrainian characters that sneaked into the mainstream Western media.

Yuri Orlov, ‘Lord of War’.

It is rare when a Ukrainian-American man is the protagonist. Yuri Orlov, played by Nicolas Cage, is the son of Ukrainian refugees who gets into the illegal arms trade in the 1980s and succeeds, to put it mildly.

Throughout the movie, Cage does everything an American might imagine a Ukrainian arms lord would do.

That includes walking around Brighton Beach, buying arms from corrupt generals in Ukraine and channeling an immigrant’s nostalgia.

The nostalgia gets out of control in a memorable scene, where Orlov’s younger brother, played by Jared Leto, lays out a map of Ukraine in cocaine.
“I start with Odesa and I work my way up to Crimea,” Leto says, only for Cage to interrupt him: “You’d be dead before you reach Kyiv.”

The epic cocaine map is a mirror image of Ukraine — either to highlight how badly Jared Leto’s character knows his homeland, or because the film crew didn’t care too much.

Oleg, ‘2 Broke Girls’

Oleg was a regular character in the CBS sitcom “2 Broke Girls,” canceled in 2017 after six seasons.

A Ukrainian migrant living in New York, Oleg works as a chef in a shabby Brooklyn diner and sometimes goes in for small “business” ventures — like smuggling cigarettes.

Oleg’s defining quality is his obtrusive sexuality. He often hits on the women around him, saying, in a thick Slavic accent, things like: “You know what they say: Once you go Ukraine, you will scream from sex pain.”

He was paired with a Polish character. It made for a little geopolitical humor. “Look, Ukraine’s going to try to invade Poland,” one character says when the two hook up.

The show’s creators mixed up Oleg’s Ukrainian background in season five though, when they put a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin on the wall of his apartment.

Valentyna, ‘Transporter 3’

In the 2008 action-movie star veteran Jason Statham was filmed fighting bad guys and jumping out of an Ukrzaliznytsya train into a black car in Odesa Oblast in “Transporter 3,” the third installment of the Luc Besson Transporter franchise.

Statham’s mission is to guard Valentyna Tomilenko, the daughter of the Ukrainian ecology minister, from bandits who want to kidnap her and then blackmail her father to get permits to bury radioactive waste.

Valentyna is a beautiful young woman with red hair, freckles and a short temper. She doesn’t want to go back to Ukraine from elsewhere in Europe and at first she doesn’t trust Statham’s character, but can’t escape from him, as they are wearing special bracelets set to explode if they are farther than 10 meters from each other.

Valentyna likes drugs and is always prepared for the worst. Like many Westerners, Statham’s character, Frank, doesn’t see the difference between Russians and Ukrainians.

When he asks Valentyna why Russians are so cheerless, she immediately responds “I’m not Russian, I’m Ukrainian. We’re different here (points to her heart) and here (points to her head.)”

Ironically, an American actress of Russian descent, Natalya Rudakova, portrayed the Ukrainian Valentyna in this movie.

Vasilii Fet, ‘Strain’

Vasilii Fet, played by U.S. actor Kevin Durant, is one of the protagonists of the Guillermo del Toro’s TV series “Strain,” based on the trilogy of books with the same name that he wrote with Chuck Hogan.

It is a story of a mysterious old vampire, who comes to New York from Romania and turns almost everyone in the city into blood-lusting vampires, using parasitic worms.

Vasilii is a child of Ukrainian immigrants, who works as an exterminator, and then joins the main characters Dr. Ephraim “Eph” Goodweather and Abraham Setrakian to kill the vampires instead of rats.

Although Vasilii is shown as a strong and courageous man, he isn’t proud to be Ukrainian. His parents immigrated from Ukraine after World War II, although they claimed to be Russians. They lied because were both ashamed of the actions of Vasilii’s grandfather, who served the Nazis as a guard in a concentration camp in Poland.

Vasilii becomes a perfect vampire killer, and Setrakian takes a shine to Fet — although he thinks the Ukrainian might be a little fond of killing.

Boris, ‘The Goldfinch’

“The Goldfinch” is a bestselling novel by American author Donna Tartt, which won her the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. The book, which spent 30 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers’ list, is a first person narration by a teenager, and then a young man, who accidentally ends up with an extremely valuable painting after falling victim to a terrorist attack in an arts museum.

The narrator’s best friend, Boris, is the son of Ukrainian migrants. He is a free-spirited, distressed teenager who likes to drink and swears in Russian — not the gibberish Russian one might encounter in a Hollywood movie, but perfectly accurate Russian obscenities, such as like “vali otsyuda.”

Warner Bros. and Amazon Studios will co-produce the film adaptation of “The Goldfinch,” but no one has yet been cast to play Boris.