page_title: Volodymyr Zelensky
section_title: Entertainment career
hierarchical_section_title: Volodymyr Zelensky / Entertainment career
caption_attribution_description: Украинский деятель шоубизнеса, актёр, продюсер Владимир Зеленский
context_page_description: Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky, officially Zelenskyy, is the 6th and current president of Ukraine. Before entering politics, he was a comedian, actor, screenwriter, film producer, and director.
  Prior to his political career, he obtained a degree in law and created a production company, Kvartal 95, which produces films, cartoons and TV comedy shows, including Servant of the People, in which Zelensky played the role of President of Ukraine. The series aired from 2015 to 2019. A namesake political party bearing the same name as the television show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.
  Zelensky announced his candidacy for the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election on the evening of 31 December 2018, alongside the New Year's Eve address of President Petro Poroshenko on 1+1 TV Channel. At the time, Zelensky had already been one of the frontrunners in opinion polls for the election. Zelensky won the election with 73.22% of the vote in the second round, defeating Poroshenko.
context_section_description: At age 17, he joined the local KVN (a comedy competition) team and was soon invited to join the united Ukrainian team "Zaporizhia-Kryvyi Rih-Transit" which performed in the KVN's Major League and eventually won in 1997. That same year, he created and headed the Kvartal 95 team which later transformed into the comedy outfit Kvartal 95. From 1998 to 2003, Kvartal 95 performed in the Major League and the highest open Ukrainian league of KVN, the team members spent a lot of the time in Moscow and constantly toured around post-Soviet countries. In 2003, Kvartal 95 started producing TV shows for the Ukrainian TV channel 1+1, and in 2005 the team moved to fellow Ukrainian TV channel Inter.
  In 2008, he starred in the feature film Love in the Big City, and its sequel, Love in the Big City 2. Zelensky continued his movie career with the film Office Romance. Our Time in 2011 and with Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon in 2012. Love in the Big City 3 was released in January 2014. Zelensky also played the leading role in the 2012 film 8 First Dates and in sequels which were produced in 2015 and 2016.
  Zelensky was a member of the board and the general producer of the TV channel Inter from 2010 to 2012.
  In August 2014, Zelensky spoke out against the intention of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture to ban Russian artists from Ukraine. Since 2015, Ukraine has banned Russian artists and other Russian works of culture from entering Ukraine. In 2018, the romantic comedy Love in the Big City 2 starring Zelensky was banned in Ukraine.
  After the Ukrainian media had reported that during the War in Donbass Zelensky's Kvartal 95 had donated 1 million hryvnias to the Ukrainian army, some Russian politicians and artists petitioned for a ban on his works in Russia. Once again, Zelensky spoke out against the intention of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture to ban Russian artists from Ukraine.
  In 2015, Zelensky became the star of the popular television series Servant of the People, where he played the role of the President of Ukraine. In the series, Zelensky's character was a thirty-something high-school history teacher who won the presidential election after a viral video showed him ranting against government corruption in Ukraine.
  Zelensky's comedy series Svaty, In-laws, was banned for display on the territory of Ukraine in 2017. The ban was lifted in March 2019.
  Zelensky worked mostly in Russian language productions. His first role in the Ukrainian language was the romantic comedy "I, You, He, She", which appeared on the screens of Ukraine in December 2018. The first version of the script was written in Ukrainian but was translated into Russian for the Lithuanian actress Agnė Grudytė. Then the movie was dubbed into Ukrainian.
caption: Zelensky in Prague in 2009
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