Netflix making first movie in Kyiv, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme

Popular U.S. streaming platform Netflix will shoot its first movie in Kyiv, Ukraine’s Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko announced on July 31.

Netflix’s action-comedy “The Last Mercenary” will star Jean-Claude Van Damme, a Belgian-born actor and bodybuilder who met with Tkachenko in Kyiv in the summer.

Van Damme will play a mysterious former secret service agent involved in political intrigues.

“A beautiful story with emotion, a lot of action and a lot of humor,” Van Damme said about the movie.

The film will be produced by the international Apple Tree film studio and Ukrainian Vlad Riashyn, a founder of Russian-Ukrainian movie production company Star Media.

Directed by French filmmaker David Charhon, this future Netflix movie will embody the “great tradition of action films of the 1980s and the 1990s,” Charhon said.

According to Minister Tkachenko, shooting has already started and will continue in Kyiv and Paris until autumn.

This is not the first time Kyiv has attracted the attention of renowned U.S. directors and actors.

On Sept. 30, 2019, U.S. actor Tom Cruise came to Kyiv to scout locations to shoot the next film in the “Mission: Impossible” series.

However, Cruise later canceled this plan. The director of “Mission: Impossible,” Christopher McQuarrie, said that it was unreasonable to go to Ukraine to film one or two scenes when there are other places around.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s capital has been in vogue among producers of commercial and music videos, with companies such as Apple, British telecom company Three UK and musicians like Miley Cyrus and Coldplay filming their work in the city due to its exotic post-Soviet architecture and low production costs.