There are few documentaries about great men that begin with them sitting on the toilet, but this one, about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, begins in the smallest room in the house.
But he’s not hiding in the bathroom: the scene is from his hit 2015 Ukrainian comedy, Servant Of The People, in which an ordinary guy is accidentally elected president.
It was a very funny series with the kind of ending that no screenwriter would dare write: the man who starred in the show actually became president four years later.
Zelensky took office on 20 May 2019. Less than three years later, on 24 February 2022, Russia invaded the country and the satirist and comedian – winner of Dancing With The Stars in Ukraine and the voice of Paddington in his homeland – suddenly became its wartime leader.
British documentary filmmaker Michael Waldman saw his press conferences, his speeches to his shattered nation, to the Houses of Parliament and to the United Nations.
He read Zelensky’s speeches, listened to his quotes and thought: “Yes, but who are you really?”
President Volodymyr Zelensky (pictured) was interviewed at length by British filmmaker Michael Waldman for the BBC’s three-part documentary The Zelensky Story, which airs on Wednesday 4 September.
President Zelensky is pictured with his family in March 2022. When the photograph was taken, Zelensky’s son Kirill was nine years old and his daughter Aleksandra (back) was fifteen. Olena Zelenska, President Zelensky’s wife, is on the right.
So, despite the dangers of operating in a war zone (involving multiple trips to bomb shelters) and the logistics of getting there (planes to Poland and then the overnight trains that have become Ukraine’s safest link to the rest of the world), he went to kyiv to ask for this new three-part BBC2 programme, The Zelensky Story.
Once he managed to charm the president (and I mean charm him) into giving what will likely be an award-winning interview, he gathered a group of his oldest showbiz friends to offer their own opinions.
“We went to school together, now you are president and I am a wedding entertainer, what lesson did I miss?” one laughs, summing up Zelensky’s unlikely path to power.
Waldman also landed a 90-minute interview with Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska. “An hour and a half? I don’t always get that chance,” her surprised husband says on camera, referring to the fact that they usually only manage to meet once a week. (The president’s English, oddly constructed but fluent, is strangely poetic.)
Olena confides in Waldman that on election night, a small part of her wished he would lose and they could go on with their almost ordinary lives.
It’s the first time he’s expressed that thought, he admits. “But he won, he always does,” he says.
He also describes how he learned that Zelensky was running for president from his pre-recorded New Year’s Eve comedy special.
The family was skiing when the video aired. “Couldn’t you have told me?” he recalls asking her. “I’m sorry, my love, I’m so sorry, she was right,” Zelensky apologizes, all through Waldman’s inquisitive, observant gaze.
President Zelensky delivers his evening address to the nation from the Mariinskyi Palace on the 211th day of the Russian invasion
The result of his conversational style is a highly crafted television portrait of a man who took the box office by storm overnight, though not for the reasons he might have imagined as a young actor. The filmmaker is clear about why his subject is important far beyond Ukraine’s borders.
“The next few months, and I fear years, will fundamentally affect our position in the world and our security,” he tells me.
‘Think of the Berlin Wall. My generation assumed it would be permanent. Then it fell.
‘The world can change terribly quickly and if Putin were to succeed and be a model for other such leaders on both sides of the Atlantic or anywhere in Europe, let alone the rest of the world, our lives would be fundamentally changed.
“This is not a far-fetched thing, we should support civil rights and democracy because it is the right thing to do, this is a man who stops evil, in my opinion, and if we ignore him we do so at our own peril.”
To illustrate his point, Waldman weaves a bit of Putin’s into Zelensky’s story. It doesn’t take many videos of Moscow’s dinosaur dictator, an analog politician sauntering through our digital age, to scare us half to death.
He has even uncovered fascinating footage of Putin watching Zelensky perform a political satire on stage in Moscow. Who would have imagined how that would end?
The soundtrack of the film is, unfortunately, the beating of the drums of war, the roar of tanks, the spitting of bullets and brave people crying.
President Zelensky pictured with former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (left), who appears in the three-part documentary
Documentary director Michael Waldman (left) is pictured with President Zelensky’s wife, Olena Zelenska, before their interview.
It is an unbearable contrast to the day of the inauguration, when Volodymyr and Olena were taking selfies and holding hands on the streets of kyiv.
Zelensky, elected on an anti-corruption ticket, had planned to serve a single term as president, leave politics in his mid-40s and return to show business in the hope of winning an Oscar. As Waldman warns, the world can change quickly.
He asks Olena what happened the night Russia invaded the country. “I woke up. It was dark and her side of the bed was already empty,” she says.
It’s one of those domestic details that reminds us that this is a human story, though Waldman marshals an impressive array of global figures (including Boris Johnson and Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the US House of Representatives, both in office at the time of the invasion) to explain the geopolitics of it all.
The most difficult questions he poses are about the future, about the war that continues as the West watches. “How can we move forward?” he asks Zelensky. “I have to,” the president replies.
“I cannot betray the people’s choice and the trust they have placed in me, and I love Ukraine. I really wanted to do something. I have this opportunity to do everything. We are used to saying that Monday is a hard day. The country is at war, so every day is Monday.”
Waldman asks if he will still be in power in 25 years and Zelensky seems surprised and amused at the same time.
President Zelensky and his wife Olena Zelenska are pictured in the garden of Stenhammar Palace in Flen, southwest of Stockholm, during the state visit of the presidential couple to Sweden on August 19, 2023.
“I’m not Putin. Believe me. I have to do (and by this I mean finish) this job to be respectable and to respect myself… my family… my children… and to help Ukraine, to do what I can, in the best way possible.”
One is left with the feeling that he would have been a formidable, cheerful and pleasant president for prosperous and peaceful times. Instead, history has demanded more of him, much more.
As for that Oscar, Sean Penn went to kyiv and gave him one of his own. Zelensky placed it on a console table between a model of a battleship and a fighter plane, a perfect metaphor for his current life.
He promised Penn that he would pay him back someday when he got to Hollywood.
- The Zelensky Story, BBC2, 9pm, Wednesday 4 September
