It’s a (Russian) revolutionary new look for Ben

BEN WHISHAW looks every inch a Seventies dude in this image, the first from a film called Limonov: The Ballad Of Eddie, about Russian dissident Eduard Limonov.

The 43-year- old actor said his character was ‘always transforming’ — he sports a magnificent moustache at another stage — ‘almost as if he led about seven completely different lives’.

Publicity material describes Limonov as a revolutionary militant, a thug, an underground writer, a butler to a millionaire in Manhattan, a switchblade-waving poet, a lover, a warmonger, a political agitator, and a novelist.

The movie-making was an adventure in itself, with Whishaw and the cast and crew forced to flee Russia on the invasion of Ukraine.

Filming continued in Europe and the picture will now receive its premiere in Cannes this spring.

Born in Dzerzhinsk, about 250 miles east of Moscow, Limonov escaped to the U.S. where he wrote poetry and novels, some of them obscene. He later returned to Russia, going into politics and founding the National Bolshevik Party (which was banned in 2007) before being incarcerated for four years. He supported Putin’s annexation of the Crimea in 2014, and died in 2020.

Whishaw, who announced two years ago that he had split from husband Mark Bradshaw, said he was ‘knocked out’ by the script, which he read in 2020.

‘He scared me, fascinated me, repelled me, thrilled me,’ he said of Limonov. ‘It was as though in every situation he found himself in, he struck a dissonant note.’

The film has been directed by dissident Russian stage and film director Kirill Serebrennikov.