Elizaveta Maximová: I don’t want to be a hasty sprinter, but a marathon runner

In one column you wrote that you need eight hugs a day. Is it true?

It was information taken from an article and it started with the words “British scientists found”… But it definitely applies to me. I am a very communicative person.

What else can’t you do without in a relationship?

I like Erich Fromm’s book The Art of Loving (in it, the famous psychologist and philosopher presents love as a skill or art that can be learned and constantly developed – editor’s note), where, among other things, different love languages ​​are described, and it seems to me that all love languages ​​are important to me at once. Be it words, deeds, attention, or physically.

What about Valentine’s Day, the holiday of lovers. Do you see it as an opportunity to indulge them all at once?

It can certainly be that way if you are in a happy relationship. But if you are struggling in a relationship or are single, you may feel especially alone on this day. For a lot of people, it’s a commercial holiday that cashes in on romantic gestures, which is true to some extent.

I like to celebrate Valentine’s Day, but at the same time I am a person who professes love often and happily, I don’t need any special day for that.

So are you permanently in love?

I feel a lot of love towards my family, my closest ones, myself, but I don’t currently have a specific person to whom I would direct the greatest amount of it. Before, it was enough for me to benefit from platonic love, from the fascination with talent, the energy of the person in question…

It is gradually changing, I have more demands and it is difficult for me to fall in love.

Not in the sense of fleeting affection, but of real, burning feeling. Because for me, true love represents something essential, formative, huge, that transcends time and space, that remains in us – even after separation – forever.

Are you implying that true love doesn’t necessarily mean a partnership?

After all, partnership is not about the fact that you cannot survive without each other, that you are dependent on each other. It doesn’t mean to me that you are looking for someone to cover the other half of your personality. A partnership can only develop when two complete people come together who simply enjoy being together. Because love cannot arise without inner self-love, self-acceptance, without being a formed personality.

Can one man enjoy one woman all his life?

My grandparents, who have been together for sixty years, are proof of that. This seems to be a great rarity nowadays, when people overcome all crisis stages together and still share a common journey. I don’t know if it was due to the stigma of that time, in which people did not divorce and stayed even in dysfunctional relationships “out of obligation”. Whereas today it is very easy to get rid of the other person and find a quick replacement.

It used to be much more difficult to get to know each other.

That’s right, there was no Internet, no social networks. I remember when I was still a teenager, I had an argument with my first boyfriend via text message and my grandfather laughed a lot about it, he told it as a funny story to his retired friends. They didn’t understand at all how you could argue with someone over a message typed in some kind of box.

Do you have experience with online dating?

I tried it many years ago, I was on one Tinder date, I haven’t used any dating apps since. All I have to do is look into my friends’ mobile phones, it’s a pain in the ass.

It fascinates me how people openly and honestly write about intimate things that you definitely wouldn’t bring up on a first meeting in a real environment. Accordingly, it is quite easy to map out the period of life in which the persons concerned are currently located.

But even a date in real life can sometimes be quite adventurous. Can you remember an unusual meeting?

When I was in high school, I bought leather heeled pumps for my first date, and my boyfriend at the time thought it would be great to walk around Prague together. We ended up talking and walking together for about six hours. As soon as we sat down on the bench, I felt that my shoes were wet, so I reached into them and they were covered in blood.

I didn’t feel the pain at all. I even ended up in the hospital and couldn’t walk for two weeks. So we didn’t see each other again until my legs were healed.

And on the other hand, do you remember the nicest confession you received from a man?

Imagine that I spent about fifteen years looking for a Barbie doll, which was discontinued in 1999. Even on vacations abroad, I always crawled through various toy stores looking for the model in question. No result. Only once on Valentine’s Day did I get the desired doll. I know that the person in question had to find it very long and difficult through collectors all over the world.

In the last three to four years, your acting star has risen quite high. How does popularity affect you?

I have a large part of my family from Tatarstan, from an acting background, and I have been thinking since I was a child how strange it is that no one knows big Tatar stars outside of home. I also encountered cases when artists could not handle the “great fame”, but my relatives, actors and directors, fortunately had this sorted out. They didn’t give any space to pride, but they gave way to the healthy doubts that belong to artistic work.

I appreciate the audience and realize how lucky I am to have people. I am happy with the offers that come to me and the fact that my colleagues notice my work. At the same time, I don’t forget how changeable the acting profession is and that you never know when you will be shooting again and what it will be.

In addition, the last year since the beginning of the war, which revolves intensively around my family from Ukraine and Russia, has reset my priorities. I learned to simply let some things go.

In the recently aired miniseries Docent directed by Jiří Strach, you play burlesque. How was the erotic dance for you?

I completed about three training sessions with excellent dancers from the Czech Cabaret Show and I was surprised at how demanding burlesque is. Although I think I know how to move, and I passed – albeit with scratched ears – dance training at DAMU, I clearly saw that I had no chance to catch up with their years of hard work in such a short time.

When Jirka arrived on the set and we showed him the choreography, we expected enthusiastic reactions. Instead he was silent for a while and then suggested that the other girls put me on the glittery step and just ride me back and forth. He later tactfully explained to me that it wasn’t because I couldn’t do the choreography, but to “stand out”. (laughter)

Did you like the cabaret setting?

I was very impressed. Above all, beautiful hand-sewn dancers’ costumes, make-up or props such as feathers or glitter. What I like best is the philosophy of burlesque, which is not really about exposure, but about flirting and seduction. I don’t see anything vulgar or tasteless about it, it’s an artistic experience performed by professional dancers.

I think in a number of nightclubs they would be considered saints in terms of access to nudity.

What appealed to you about the role of Oxana, a former ballerina who co-owns a gym and also performs in a dance club?

I only knew the synopsis for Docent, not the specific role. I wanted to try working with Jiří Strach, about whom I had heard nothing but praise. So when I walked into the casting room where there were a lot of people, I was ready to improvise or read individual scenes. But none of that happened.

Jiří sat me on a chair opposite him and we talked for a while, then he thanked me saying that he had everything he needed and that we would see each other on the set soon.

Later, I asked him how he knew I was right for the role when he didn’t even know if I could do an Eastern accent. I learned that for him the key is the energy that an actor or actress radiates, he also saw my previous work. It was a very interesting meeting for me.

The audience will probably be relieved that you’re not playing an assassin. You are often seen in this role, for example in Cases of the First Department or the new detective story Place of the Crime of České Budějovice.

I don’t share the feeling that I belong to the box of murderers, for example in Stockholm Syndrome I figured as a victim, in the aforementioned Docent as a witness. But sometimes it happens that projects that are shot at different times go to the screens at the same time. As an actor, I can’t control that. I first encountered this role in Justice, then only a few times over the course of five years.

Female assassins are refined, they go through psychological development, it’s an interesting acting challenge. They have to act like chameleons. When we were filming Případy I. departament, I kept asking the director Michal Blašek how a young mother could behave so cold-bloodedly. I enjoyed uncovering and imagining her inner motivations. But when you know that the script corresponds to real events, you get goosebumps.

Do you choose roles in miniseries or serials with a detective plot purposefully?

I would rather say that it comes by itself, there is no initial calculation involved. Personally, I enjoy this genre immensely in any role. Crime stories, if they are well written and go below the surface, reveal people’s souls. This is exactly why I think they are so popular and that so many are being created.

Speaking of genres – is there one you avoid?

I don’t know of any. I like to try different things, the closest to my heart are period pieces. I already tried that in Božena Němcová, where I played Karolina Světla, or during the filming of the miniseries Actor, where I played Marta Švarcová, an ardent communist. The film Světýlka, which is set in the nineties, will also be released this year.

The plot revolves around a few summer days in the life of a six-year-old girl, when she realizes that her parents’ marriage is falling apart. When I watched how I was dressed and made up as her mother, I saw my mother in her youth. A similar thing happened to me in Herce, where I look like a copy of my great-grandmother.

Is that why you like them so much? Thanks to this fascinating transformation?

That too. But also thanks to the fact that you can immerse yourself in another time. You see and read dozens of documentaries while preparing for a role, but it’s never enough. I also find out a lot from costume designers, make-up artists or film architects, I turn into an enthusiastic child who craves information.

And now it occurs to me that I have never tried a fairy tale. This is also a childhood dream. I’m slowly growing out of princess age, so I’m a little afraid that I won’t miss it. (laughter)

Maybe you’ll skip it and be straight up queen.

It doesn’t look like it yet, I’ve only been to a princess casting once. They dressed me in pink dresses, put on make-up, did curls and then I got a call from the production saying that the director had chosen me for the role of the death girl. Well, in the end, not even a death occurred, but it made me laugh.

For example, I would like a well-written comedy role. Ladislav Mrkvička, our pedagogue at DAMU, said that I am the comedic type, but until I find a director who sees that in me, I will be cast more often in the roles of women with a complicated fate. So for now I’m still waiting.

You are said to be an honest actress who is able to sacrifice a lot for a role. What wouldn’t you do to your soul?

I wouldn’t go over corpses and I wouldn’t want to get any role by dishonest means. I realize the fragility of the soul and how easy it is to dull it, to betray it – for example, if I did things only for money, not from inner conviction.

I am able to sacrifice a lot for preparation: I will gain weight, lose weight, get a haircut if I fall in love with the role. The difference is that while a few years ago I would have done it all straight away and not thought about the consequences, now I would be much more careful and would like to have professional supervision. I feel like I don’t want to hurt my body. I don’t want to be a hasty sprinter, but a marathon runner.