Jude Law joked that he hopes he wasn’t naive when he “didn’t fear repercussions” for taking the part of Vladamir Putin in French director Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin, a fictionalized account of the Russian president’s ruthless rise to power throughout the 1990s. The political thriller is premiering at the Venice Film Festival this weekend and Law, Assayas and stars Paul Dano, Alicia Vikander and Jeffrey Wright were all on hand on the Lido on Sunday to discuss its creation.

“Olivier and I discussed that this wasn’t to be an impersonation of Putin and he didn’t want me to hide behind a mask of prosthetics,” Law said. “We worked with an amazing makeup and hair team and had references of that period in Putin’s life. We tried to find a familiarity on me.”

Although the actor’s appearance is altered for the part, he speaks in his natural voice throughout the film rather than attempting a Russian accent.

“It’s amazing what a great wig can do,” he added, drawing laughs from the festival crowd.

The Wizard of the Kremlin adapts Italian author Giuliano da Empoli’s award-winning novel of the same name into a tense political drama about the rise of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Paul Dano stars as Vadim Baranov, a gifted former artist-turned-spin doctor who masterminds propaganda and media manipulation at the Kremlin. Law portrays a younger Vladimir Putin, depicted as ruthlessly calculating and enigmatic, while Alicia Vikander plays Ksenia, Baranov’s lover and moral counterweight. Spanning from the 1990s to the 2000s, the film dramatizes wars, disasters, and revolutions through Baranov’s eyes, charting his transformation from idealist to architect of authoritarian power — as well as the personal toll of becoming Putin’s “wizard.” Dano’s character is based on Vladislav Sourkov, the real-life fixer who’s been credited for helping choreograph Putin’s rise.

When asked by a journalist whether he could find any positives in Putin’s persona while playing the autocrat, Law paused to think, before saying, “Well, I learned judo, so I took my own positive from that.” 

The actor said he “went down that rabbit hole” of watching archival footage of Putin, and that the “tricky side” of playing the character was how “the public face that we see gives very little away.”

“There’s this mask,” Law added, also referencing journalist Masha Gessen’s book “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.”

“So, I was conflicted as an actor, often, when Olivier would want me — understandably, as a character within a scene — to portray this or that with an emotion to motivate the scene,” Law explained. “I felt that conflict of trying to show very little but feel an awful lot from within — and that was the key, quite honestly.” 

Assayas addressed the timeliness of Putin’s origin story in a world where autocracy seems to be relentlessly on the rise.

“The film is very much about how modern politics, 21st Century politics, were invented — and part of that evil arose from the rise to power of Vladimir Putin in Russia,” Assayas said. “We made a movie about what politics has become and the very scary and dangerous situation we all feel we are in. We took a case — which was the specific story of Vladimir Putin — but I think it applies to a lot of authoritarian leaders. … What’s going on right now is not only terrifying, but because we haven’t really seen a relevant reaction or answer emerging.”