Meet the Shooting Stars: Mateusz Kosciukiewicz and Nikola Rakocevic

The balance between glamour and diligence for this year's Shooting Stars was aptly on display at their photo shoot this morning. An 8.30am start at the shoot location meant lie-ins were not much of an option for the ten actors, and Norway's Jakob Oftebro may have been regretting going on to Soho House after the Danish party last night, where he more or less closed up the bar with Harvey Weinstein. On the other hand, Jakob looked totally fresh and rested, such are the advantages of youth.
In between the styling sessions for the shoot (the snaps with me above are as we arrived, before the grooming team worked their magic), I managed to grab some interview time with both Poland's Mateusz Kosciukiewicz and Serbia's Nikola Rakocevic, and both told similarly engaging accounts of their first steps into acting.

Nikola Rakocevic and Charles Gant © Sinissey

Nikola grew up in the town of Kragujevac in central Serbia, about 100km from Belgrade. He has one older brother, his father was a forklift-truck driver and his mother worked in accounts for an insulation manufacturer. Mateusz grew up in the small town of Nowy Tomysl, near Poznan in western Poland. He also has one older brother, his father is a carpenter and his mother a hospital cleaner.
Both were encouraged to act as teenagers by inspiring women who fostered local talent. For Nikola it was the Kragujevac after-school acting club run by a woman called Slavica Urosevic. Not only did she encourage his acting, but she also inspired all the kids to “find yourself”, and to make the best of themselves in whatever direction their life took them. In the case of Mateusz, it was while visiting the local cultural centre at Nowy Tomysl that the woman who ran it, Renata Smiertelna, persuaded him to read a poem aloud, and then encouraged him down the path of acting. Together with local retired actor Henryk Dabrowski, she ultimately helped him prepare for theatre school in Wroclaw – a Silesian city better known outside Poland by the name Breslau.

Nikola had previously received encouragement to act by his grandfather, who whenever he had friends visiting would ask the nine-year-old to perform characters from his favourite TV show Djekna. Meanwhile his grandmother – the whole family lived in the same house together – developed his acting by improvising scenes together, sometimes in a made-up language. “I always say that my grandfather was my first agent and my grandmother was my first acting teacher,” says Nikola.
Mateusz had a chequered history at acting school, transitioning from puppet theatre to drama and not completing his degree. He looks back on those years with self-deprecating amusement at his own behaviour, which involved “challenging everything – I wanted to make my own new style, invent the programme. It was crazy.” Also problematic was his accepting roles in films, which as all actors know is deeply discouraged at acting school, since it interferes with the teaching programme. “Half of the professors wanted to kick me out and the other half wanted to give me another chance because they believed in my talent,” he says.

He is aware of his incredible good fortune that the Polish film industry, after a difficult transition from the full state subsidy of the Communist era, was at last beginning to find its feet again just as he was making his way as an actor. There had been a dearth of career opportunities, he says, for his immediate antecedents. But in 2009's All That I Love, “I was the first young actor in a long time to be given an opportunity to have a big success in the cinema.” Comparisons with Zbigniew Cybulski – aka “the Polish James Dean” – ensued.

Although it feels almost trivial to talk about the tragic conflict in this context, Nikola agrees that growing up during the wars of former Yugoslavia, in which his father was conscripted to fight, and in which “for three years as a child I am seeing dead people on TV every day”, certainly gives him access to deeper emotions that may not be so easily available to all – ones that he can convey with restraint and subtlety. You get more than a hint of that in his film Circles, the true story of Srdjan Aleksic, a Bosnian Serb soldier who in 1993 lost his life defending an ethnic Bosnian shopkeeper from being attacked by a group of fellow soldiers.

I'm reminded of Mark Wahlberg, who very different reasons had known troubles in his youth, experiences that can help him get to the necessary place a lot quicker than, in his mocking words, “Let me think about the colour blue. Let me think about my dead cat.”

Mateusz is returning to the Berlinale after his film In The Name Of, directed by his wife Malgorzata Szumowska, won the Teddy Award here last year. He was also just in the city shooting the German-Australian co-production Elixir, an English-language film in which he plays a Frenchman, alongside former Shooting Star Natasha Petrovic. Meanwhile Nikola has likewise made a foray into English with the Las Vegas-set Travelator. “I don't have so many lines,” cautions the actor – not, he clarifies because his role is small. He plays the protagonist, a hired assassin who is despatched to Vegas to kill a protected witness. “He's a silent guy who kills other people,” explains Nikola.