Zlatko Burić has spent thirty years playing the Eastern European with the money or the gun, and plainly enjoying it. In the right film the enjoyment is the performance; in the wrong one it is all he is given.
Fi1m perspective
On the yacht in Triangle of Sadness (2022), Zlatko Burić plays Dimitry, a Russian who made his fortune in fertiliser, and the joke is that he is the one guest having a wonderful time. Ruben Östlund fills the boat with people we are meant to squirm at, and Burić declines to squirm. We laughed at him more than at anyone else on board, and then noticed we were laughing with him, which we doubt was the intention. It is a supporting part in a long, blunt film, and he was the pick of it.
He came to acting late, by his own account, after theatre in Yugoslavia: training at the Dramski Studio in Osijek in 1972, then the experimental company Kugla Glumište, then a move to Denmark in 1981. Film did not find him until the mid-1990s, when Nicolas Winding Refn cast him as Milo in Pusher (1996), a part he returned to in Pusher II (2004) and Pusher III (2005). He has said he only decided he was an actor after that first film, which he went into reluctantly. Refn has now used him four times, and Milo is still the part he is known for.
The English-language work that followed has been steady and narrow. Ivan in Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Yuri Karpov in 2012 (2009), Dimitry on the yacht, then Wolfs (2024), Superman (2025) and The Bride (2026). The parts are Russians and Eastern Europeans, criminals and oligarchs and men in charge, and casting departments in two languages have heard the accent and stopped listening there. In Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride he is Lupino, and we came away with nothing to say about him, which in a film that is rarely the same film for ten minutes together is not entirely his doing.
What works is the looseness. Years of experimental theatre left him with a way of standing in a scene as if he had wandered into it and might wander out again, and in an ensemble that is playing for discomfort this reads as freedom. He is at his best when a director lets that ease be the point, as Östlund does; he is wasted when a film wants only the type and takes the man for granted.
He is in his seventies and busier in Hollywood than he has ever been. We would like to see someone give him a lead, or failing that a character who is not Russian. Failing both, another dinner.
Biography
Zlatko Burić is a Croatian-Danish actor. He was born on 13 May 1953 in Osijek, Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia), and trained at the Dramski Studio there in 1972. In the 1970s and early 1980s he was a member of the experimental theatre group Kugla Glumište before moving to Denmark in 1981.
Burić is best known for playing Milo in the Pusher film trilogy (1996–2005), directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, for which he received a Bodil Award. Other notable film roles include Yuri Karpov in 2012 (2009), Dmitry in Triangle of Sadness (2022) — for which he won a European Film Award and a Guldbagge Award — Dimitri in Wolfs (2024), Vasil Ghurkos in Superman (2025), and Lupino in The Bride! (2026). He has also appeared in television series including Wonder Man (2026).
