Why Artjom Gilz Found Filming Andrei's Menacing Acts on Peacock's PONIES "Quite Fun"
Artjom Gilz, who plays KGB officer Andrei Vasiliev in Peacock's PONIES, enjoyed that his character could be "as menacing as you want to be."
Key Takeaways
- Actors Artjom Gilz and Petro Ninovskyi got close while filming PONIES despite their characters being opposites and enemies.
- Gilz found playing ruthless KGB officer Andrei enjoyable Read More
- Actors Artjom Gilz and Petro Ninovskyi got close while filming PONIES despite their characters being opposites and enemies.
- Gilz found playing ruthless KGB officer Andrei enjoyable since he got to flex his acting skills.
- A particularly intense interrogation scene in Episode 5 was shaped by Gilz’s suggestion to incorporate a cigarette burn, which the creators and his scene partner approved.
Peacock's espionage thriller series PONIES is set in Cold War-era 1970s Moscow, a time rife with clandestine KGB and CIA counterintelligence activity.
The show's main characters — CIA agent wives Bea (Emilia Clarke) and Twila (Haley Lu Richardson) — voluntarily leave civilian life behind and convince the CIA to let them start working as operatives after they're told that their husbands died in a plane crash and the women weren't getting the answers they wanted.
Bea and Twila eventually develop a knack for international espionage, and quickly find themselves in the mix with a whole range of Moscow locals, including the menacing KGB officer Andrei Vasiliev (Artjom Gilz) and his exact opposite, sympathetic CIA informer Sasha Shevchenko (Petro Ninovskyi).
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Andrei and Sasha are enemies and couldn't be more different. But Ninovskyi told Peacock Blog that in real life, the actors who play them got along so well that they didn't dream of limiting contact with each other in order to get into the spirit of their characters.
"Our method was actually to spend as much time together as possible," Ninovskyi shared. "On set, we would always just spend time together and talk to each other and that was the key to find a chemistry even between those completely opposite characters."
Artjom Gilz admits playing murderous KGB officer Andrei Vasiliev was "quite fun"
Gilz plays KGB officer Andrei Vasiliev with an icy ruthlessness that makes him utterly convincing in the role. In real life, Gilz was born in the Soviet Union but later moved to Germany.
On PONIES, viewers see Andrei engage in some truly heinous crimes and activities. And Gilz enjoyed being able to bring what was written for his character to life.
"Obviously, seeing the [acts] on screen and reading them on the page are horrific but doing them, they're actually quite fun because you know it's make-believe and obviously you're not really hurting anybody," Gilz told Peacock Blog. "So just to explore that and be as menacing as you want to be and do whatever you want, then it was quite fun."
Over the eight episodes of PONIES, Andrei commits an array of terrible deeds, but there was one that stood out in Gilz's mind as being particularly rough.
He pointed to Episode 5, "Turn the Beat Around," where Andrei brutally interrogates Manya Caplan, played by English actress and Olivier Award winner, Harriet Walter.
"When we staged it and when we rehearsed it, I was like, ‘Okay, what are we going to do?’ Andrei is smoking a lot and she has this tattoo that identifies her as having been in a [concentration] camp, and I had this idea," Gilz told Peacock Blog. "I was like, ‘How about if I actually burn her with a cigarette because that would remind her of the camp?’ Harriet was saying her character had been to a camp, and now here comes a blond, blue-eyed man in a suit... Obviously, she's going to be triggered."
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Gilz said that series creators David Iserson and Susanna Fogel explored how to stage the scene, and that his scene partner Walter agreed to it. "[The scene] actually made it into the show, which was really, really cool," Gilz said.
Catch Gilz and Ninovskyi in action by streaming PONIES on Peacock, where all eight episodes are available to watch right now.
