Meet Petro Ninovskyi

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Petro Ninovskyi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Petro , we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?

It’s funny you ask this. Because even though many of my friends/collages/classmates perceive me as an extremely confident actor, I think that I’m a deeply vulnerable person with not the strongest sense of confidence. I’m working on it, of course. I think many actors are that way. There is a fine line between being confident and being uncertain. As one of my teachers said once: the less certain you are-the more freedom you have; the more work you do-the less certain you are. I think, I just try to do “my thing” and find the balance between these two, absolutely necessary, conditions that actors need to have- confidence and uncertainty. One thing that always helped me was trying to stop worrying about the result and concentrate on the process. The journey is the goal. And yeah: “..We are scared because we care”.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’m a 4th year MFA Acting student at Juilliard. Graduating this year, which I’m very excited about: it’s been a long time that I’ve been in school, basically 10 years. I completed my undergrad and grad acting programs back in Ukraine where I am originally from, both in acting: The Karpenko-Karyi Kyiv National Theatre, Cinema, and TV University. Long story short, I’m an actor.
This final year at Juilliard kicked off for me with a real challenge. Probably the biggest acting challenge that I had ever faced on my acting path: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” by Edward Albee. I had a joy and a burden of responsibility to take on the part of George, and my oh my, was it a mountain. Not only it is one of the most emotionally demanding plays in the American Theatre landscape, it is one of the wordiest parts as well. And I had to battle my way through it, each day discovering a new layer, a new trajectory of George’s mind.
As our director, Michael Rudko, said: George is completely “bottomless”, the pebble just keeps falling down in his well of rue. And I must admit, I struggled for a long time to take ownership over George’s character, I haven’t felt that bad about my acting in a while, but as they say “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, and it did make us, the whole cast, better actors than we were before. I think, we jumped over our heads, and it’s a good feeling.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Hard work. Well, probably not hard work, because, and I think you would agree with me on this, it’s better to work smart, than hard. But constant and persistent work is the key, in my opinion. Amazing actress and just a wonderful soul, Jessica Hecht, came to speak to us at Juilliard recently, and she told us that she had this goal when she was only beginning her acting journey- she would spend at least an hour every day doing something for her acting career: working on her speech, voice, or working on a scene, or reaching out to people asking for an advice/opinion on “this and that”, thus expending her community circle.
I think it leads into another skill, which is the ability to stay open. Open to anything: success or failure, a change, a possibility, an invitation or a rejection, better days or days that could be better. This all is an essential part of “your way” and everything is equally important on this list.
And the third thing is to always remember that there is something bigger than your show, work, career and so on. Some people call it “God”, some people call it “family”, some people call it “friends”, some people don’t call it anything, they just “know” and “just keep livin’…”as Matthew McConaughey writes in his book. Those green lights are ahead of you.

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

Success is a very relative thing, and I’m not fully sure If I can apply it to myself just yet. But, at any rate, I don’t think there is one particular person that I could emphasize. I mean, there are a lot of them. I’m very blessed in terms of being surrounded by extremely gifted, caring and loving people who influence me in every possible way. But I guess, the accumulation of all this: the books I read, the movies I watch, the music I listen to, the people I communicate with, made me into the person I am today. Andrew Wade, one of my speech teachers always says that “…we teach you so that one day you could become your own teachers. That is the ultimate goal.”
I’m on my way!

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Image Credits

Pavlo Zhupanyn
Olga Oborina
Maya Maximova

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