The British actor portrays the Russian leader in the political thriller ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’
British actor Jude Law, who is portraying Russian President Vladimir Putin in ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’, has been spotted on the set of the film, according to photos circulating on social media.
The film follows the story of a fictional political operative, presumably loosely based on former Putin aide Vladislav Surkov, who helps the Russian leader rise to power.
The image, shared on Tuesday by Novaya Gazeta Europe, shows Law wearing a dark suit on a stage in Riga, Latvia while surrounded by extras.
’The Wizard of the Kremlin’ focuses on Vadim Baranov, a fictional former avant-garde artist-turned TV producer who becomes the chief political adviser to a rising figure within Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) – soon revealed as Vladimir Putin in the 1990s.
EXCLUSIVE: First photos of Jude Law as Vladimir Putin in Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin, a movie about 1990s Russia currently being filmed in Riga.
— Novaya Gazeta Europe (@novayagazeta_en) March 25, 2025
“Working at the heart of Russian power, Baranov blurs truth with lies, the news with propaganda, directing the entire society like one great reality show,” the film’s synopsis reads.
The film is based on Giuliano da Empoli’s bestseller novel of the same name, published in April 2022. That year, it won the Grand prix du roman de l’Academie francaise.
Though Baranov is a fictional character, he is considered to be modeled after Vladislav Surkov, a former aide to Putin who served as deputy prime minister and a senior official in the presidential administration, and is often described as the Kremlin’s ‘gray cardinal’.
He is also known as a proponent of ‘sovereign democracy’, the idea of building a strong state with a focus on the material well-being of the population. More recently, he has predicted the expansion of the ‘Russian world’ as well as a rapprochement between Moscow and the West.
Commenting on the upcoming film, Surkov said, “No one is safe from this.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov noted that no one contacted the Russian authorities about the film, and that the Kremlin did not know the exact plot of the story.
Law is no stranger to portraying Russian or Russian-linked figures. In ‘Enemy at the Gates’ (2001), he played renowned Soviet sniper Vasily Zaitsev in a dramatization of the Battle of Stalingrad. He also starred in ‘Anna Karenina’ (2012) as Aleksey Karenin, a senior government official in Imperial Russia. Law also played Dr. Watson in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes franchise opposite Robert Downey Jr., and received critical acclaim for playing a manipulative pontiff in The Young Pope series.
