Ronin plays the man inside the system who still believes in it, and he plays him without a wink or an apology. It made Oleg Burov the quiet conscience of The Americans; since then, casting has kept sending him back to Moscow.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Costa Ronin listen. As Oleg Burov in The Americans (2014–2018) he spends much of his time on the receiving end of instructions, from superiors, from family, from Americans who think they have his measure, and he takes them in with a stillness that gives nothing away and a face that has plainly already made up its mind. It is the opposite of the usual screen Russian, all cigarettes and menace. Ronin's KGB officer is the calmest person in most rooms, and the most unsettling thing about him is that he means well.
He came to the part by a long road. Born in Kaliningrad, he moved to New Zealand and then Australia around 2001, where he worked in local productions, including East West 101 and the feature Red Dog (2011), before going to the United States in the early 2010s. Burov began as a recurring role and became a main one, 61 episodes over five seasons. After that came Homeland (2018–2020), as the GRU operative Yevgeny Gromov, a brief appearance as Wojciech Frykowski in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019), The Endgame, and a regular part in the fifth season of For All Mankind as Leonid Polivanov, a former cosmonaut turned politician.
What he does well is specific. His accent and his cultural detail are his own, and he has said as much: "There is no substitute for that. You can fake the accent... but you will never be that person. You will never think in that language." He prepares by going back to Russia and looking, and it shows in the small things, the way Burov wears a coat or pauses before a superior. Over five seasons we came to dread his scenes the way you dread news about a friend who has done nothing wrong, because Ronin plays a man doing the decent thing inside an institution built to punish it, and he never once asks for our sympathy. That refusal is why the sympathy arrives anyway.
The trouble is what happens when the series ends and the phone rings. Homeland looked at Burov and ordered another Russian intelligence officer, contemporary rather than Cold War but the same file. For All Mankind has him as a Soviet again, though at least not a spy, and we have not yet weighed his work in that season. The accent that makes him credible is also the thing that keeps him in one corner of the casting office, and it is hard to know from the outside whether that is his choice or theirs.
The obvious next step is for someone to cast him as a man from anywhere else, and let us see what is left when the language is not doing part of the work. Until then, The Americans is the place to look, and he is one of the reasons to stay for all 75 episodes.
Biography
Costa Ronin is a Russian-born Australian actor. Born Konstantin Ronin in Kaliningrad in 1979, he moved to New Zealand in his late teens and later settled in Australia, where he studied acting after earlier education in international relations and political science.
He is best known for portraying Oleg Igorevich Burov in the FX series The Americans (2014–2018). Other television roles include Yevgeny Gromov in Homeland (2018–2020), appearances in Gotham (2016), Marvel's Agent Carter (2015), Scorpion (2015) and For All Mankind (2019–). Film credits include Voytek Frykowski in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019). He has also worked as a cinematographer on several short films.
