It turns out that President Dmitry Medvedev’s son is an actor.
Ilya Medvedev, now 16, appeared in two episodes of the popular sketch comedy “Yeralash” in 2007 and 2008, the year his father became president.
In the 2007 episode, titled “Hero,” Ilya Medvedev walks out of a movie theater practicing his superhero moves after watching “X-Men.” He sees a girl screaming for help as two men attack her, and leaps to the rescue, punching and kicking the men into submission. At that moment, a man dressed as a film director appears and starts scolding him, saying, “What are you doing? We are shooting the seventh take because of heroes like you,” he says.
Ilya Medvedev’s involvement in the popular show, which has aired since 1974, was first by Komsomolskaya Pravda on Thursday.
While Ilya Medvedev is credited in the episodes, the common Russian surname didn’t ring a bell with audiences. Dmitry Medvedev worked as a first deputy prime minister when the episodes were filmed.
Interestingly, Dmitry Medvedev himself was once compared to an action hero, Batman’s young friend Robin, in a U.S. diplomatic exchange leaked by WikiLeaks. Putin was compared to Batman.
Alexei Sheglov, who directed the 2007 episode, praised Ilya Medvedev as a “talented and funny guy.”
“He did everything right,” Sheglov told Komsomolskaya Pravda, adding that he knew about Medvedev’s father at the time but the filming was business as usual for him.
Alexander Gamov, a Kremlin-connected reporter who wrote the Komsomolskaya Pravda article, said the boy was selected in an audition.
Yeralash founder Boris Grachevsky declined to comment.
Curiously, Komsomolskaya Pravda removed the article from its web site late Thursday afternoon. A call to the newspaper’s press office for comment went unanswered.
The young Medvedev also appeared in a “Yeralash” episode in 2008 about a boy who wants to star in a movie. While trying to get the attention of the film crew, he gets into a hot air balloon that accidentally flies away.
Dmitry Medvedev, unlike his mentor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, does not try to hide his son from public life, and the Kremlin web site shows a picture of the boy. In contrast, Putin has kept his two daughters away from the public eye, and the only pictures of them that have been released were taken when they were young children.
“This was … Putin’s personal decision,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov Dozhd television last week, adding that the prime minister wants his family to “live a normal life.”
