Artur Smolyaninov

Acting

Artur Smolyaninov (born 27 October 1983) is a Russian stage and screen actor, as well as a musician. He is best known for his leading role as Oleg Lutaev in Fyodor Bondarchuk’s war drama The 9th Company (2005), and for his work in international productions such as The Darkest Hour (2011) and Redirected (2014), and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur (2026), in which he played a bit part. Smolyaninov was born on 27 October 1983 in Moscow and grew up in a creative family: his mother was a painter and art teacher, and his father taught music. He was drawn into movies almost by chance when, at fourteen, he was cast in Valery Priemykhov’s Who If Not Us (1998), a performance that won him a best teenage actor prize at the Artek International Film Festival. At sixteen he entered the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (RATI-GITIS) in Leonid Kheifets’s workshop, graduating in 2004 with roughly a dozen sc…