In her career spanning a little over a decade, actress Anna Baryshnikov has had her eye on one goal: finding an opportunity to become more than a supporting character in someone else’s story.
In a short amount of time, she’s cultivated a pedigreed résumé of films — including with established auteurs — from Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog and Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, to Sara Colangelo’s acclaimed Maggie Gyllenhaal drama The Kindergarten Teacher and Rose Glass’ surreal female bodybuilder thriller Love Lies Bleeding.
Baryshnikov has also landed roles on series like Apple’s Peabody Award winner Dickinson and the CBS sitcom Superior Donuts, but nothing that quite embodied the experience she was looking for.
Rather than stardom, what the actress was chasing was a certain kind of creative immersion.
“I’ve had all of these great jobs,” she says, “where I have three great days on set and they’re the best days of my year, and I was always so jealous of the person I was acting opposite, who knew every single crew member by name, and had been immersed in the film the entire time. So I was really just chasing that experience.”
Taking the Lead
When that opportunity presented itself in Idiotka, a smartly scripted and directed indie comedy marking the feature debut of Nastasya Popov, Baryshnikov chased it hard.
Opening via Utopia this Friday, after premiering to critical acclaim at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival, Idiotka is at once a fashion-world satire, a moving portrait of an immigrant family, and a resonant tale of a young woman coming into her own — one that mirrors Baryshnikov’s own journey. The actress plays Margarita, a fashionista living in West Hollywood’s Russian district who signs on to a fashion competition series both to help her family get by, financially, and to show what she’s made of, creatively.
On Idiotka, Baryshnikov leads a cast including Julia Fox, Camila Mendes, Benito Skinner, Owen Thiele and Saweetie, while also securing her first credit as an executive producer. She came to the project via college friend Russel Kahn about a year into its development and says she “fell in love with Nastasya’s writing from the first page, which has truly never happened to me before.”
Obsessed with the script, she got on multiple Zooms with Popov in an effort, she says, to “incept” herself into the filmmaker’s mind for the lead role.
In truth, Baryshnikov shouldn’t have had to fight all that hard: the role fit her like a glove. As an actress, she could of course relate to Margarita’s desire to transform through her art — in the character’s words, “to be someone new every day.”
And even a cursory internet search reveals Baryshnikov as a kindred spirit to Margarita in her passion for fashion. She says she loves it “the way that people who aren’t in the film industry love films,” interacting with it daily. Like Popov — whose sister is a designer — some of those closest to Baryshnikov have dabbled in the craft, giving her both an understanding of the world Margarita seeks to inhabit and an appreciation for how “deeply personal” that work is, even if the creator’s face isn’t always prominently linked to it, as with actors. Moreover, like Popov, Baryshnikov is the daughter of a Russian immigrant and found herself reflecting intimately on her heritage while working on the project.
Sewing Up The Role
If Popov put Baryshnikov through her paces before officially casting her, the actress didn’t mind. She instead felt confidence in the presence of someone with “a real creative backbone” who “wasn’t just trying to get her film made at any cost.”
Once officially aboard, Baryshnikov threw herself into prep, taking sewing classes in Los Angeles’ Garment District and helping Popov get the film in motion. She drew inspiration from the determination of Popov and her producing partner Tess Cohen to make the film a reality, shooting a teaser with them as part of the effort to secure financing — a “critical moment” for the collaborators for multiple reasons.
Through that process, she witnessed what Popov would be like to work with and came around to complete trust in her — her “incredible feel for comedic timing,” her compelling visual sensibility, and the “beast” she is in the edit.
After the teaser, Popov began writing her lead character further toward Baryshnikov, with the film moving more decisively in the direction of the comedic sensibility that would become one of its greatest assets.
Popov came to Idiotka with “a lot about her own personal life to get off her chest…that felt very emotional,” Baryshnikov says, but it came as “a good surprise” for both the director and her lead when they saw how tonally multifaceted the film could be.
During prep, Baryshnikov helped refine the story and her character by asking as many questions as possible.
“Especially with a first-time filmmaker and a young woman, I was very wary of not wanting to just give notes towards what I thought was the best version of the script,” she explains. “I wanted the purest distillation of her voice, so I think I really was trying to ask as many clarifying questions as I could.”
Boots On The Ground
Working on Idiotka as an EP has led Baryshnikov to a deeper understanding of producing — what real boots-on-the-ground work looks like. Ahead of the release, she’s handed out flyers in the snow and supported grassroots efforts to raise awareness for the film.
Part of the experience, she says, has been learning “the lesson that the character learns in the movie” — not to be a people-pleaser or shy about what she wants, but to truly put herself out there.
In the past, she’s approached releases with a kind of quiet detachment, saying something to the effect of “Yeah, it’s my project. I love it. But you do you.” That wasn’t the case here.
“It’s a totally new experience,” she says, “to be out there, saying, ‘Please see this. I care about it so much.’”
The Backstory
If Baryshnikov’s confidence in advocating for her own work is new, her devotion to craft is not. She first got on stage at age six in a children’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and has said that being an actor was one of the first core truths she recognized about herself.
The daughter of famed ballet dancers — actor Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lisa Rinehart — she was “dead set” on becoming a child actor from early in life, though her parents wouldn’t allow it.
“Whenever I admired an actor,” she says, “I would immediately go to IMDb and see how old they were when they did their first job. And I would be like, ‘See, mom, she was nine years old. If I don’t do it now, it’s never going to happen.’”
“In a lot of ways,” she adds, “I was right. I do think this era of actors that are proper movie stars, most of them started working before they were 18.”
Baryshnikov began auditioning professionally at 16, and while continuously antsy to get her career in motion as she got older, she eventually committed to a longer route toward professional life — attending Northwestern University, where she studied theater.
These ended up being “incredible years to learn about…the kind of thinking actor I could be, who was active in the process, which I think really came in handy” on Idiotka.
Inheritance and Expectation
Baryshnikov fully owns being a “nepo baby,” even if she specifically asked her parents not to get involved on her behalf as she found her professional footing. Her story is complicated by the fact that this exact privilege made her feel guilty for asking for the opportunities that she most coveted. Moreover, she confesses that her family background resulted in an experience of imposter syndrome that proved difficult to shake.
“I think something that I held onto for a long time was the fact that my [dad’s] potential was so clear from the beginning,” she says. “He was so gifted at what he did that he was plucked out of class and moved to a different city and it completely changed his life.”
Without a similarly meteoric trajectory, she feared she might not personally have the goods.
“Especially when I first started auditioning, I was petrified that I would get proof that I was not talented,” she says, “and for a while, it felt very devastating that I didn’t get some kind of role before 25 that felt like it made the rest of my career inevitable.”
But in taking time to grow into herself and accruing one win after another, Baryshnikov says nothing now feels like a fluke — it feels “hard-fought.”
The Career That Chose Her
Baryshnikov suggests that in some ways, it feels like her career is one that’s been chosen for her. While she grew up loving fish-out-of-water comedies like Legally Blonde and Private Benjamin, she never specifically set out with comedy as an emphasis, instead learning about herself based on the jobs she was offered. “I think coming out of school, I was like, ‘Oh, well I want to do Romeo and Juliet,’” she says. “And then actually, where I was getting bites was stuff with a more comedic sensibility.”
Baryshnikov also concedes that she’s never worked as much as she would’ve liked, while acknowledging the gift of the fact that the projects she has landed have been ones she’s very passionate about.
To this day, she can find herself struggling with the “very impossible standard” she’s set for herself, and that was set for her by her parents’ success. She’s trying to let that go, though, leaning instead into her appreciation of “the experience of making things.”
Walking away from Idiotka, Baryshnikov takes a lesson from Popov that the word no “shouldn’t be something that throws you. It shouldn’t make you super sad. It’s just the baseline, and you just keep on keeping on until you get the yes that you’re looking for.”
A Hard Vibe
There’s a comfort and utility in this approach, in a time of industry contraction when yeses are even harder to come by.
“The vibe is hard,” Baryshnikov says of Hollywood in 2026. “The industry is so risk-averse right now, I’m even watching with my friends trying to get their films made. They’re told there’s like three actresses in the world that would make it financeable, and so it’s an incredibly difficult time.”
It’s been strange to adapt, post-pandemic, to a new world oriented around self-taping, as someone who loves connecting with casting directors in-person. The silver lining in this, though, is the new sense of community amongst actors that has resulted, at least in her own circle.
“I really get to work with my friends on my auditions and work on their auditions, and we get to witness each other’s work,” she shares. “We’re in each other’s kitchens and living rooms; we’re all trying to problem-solve together.”
Finding the Positive
This level of connectivity doesn’t make everything easier, of course. Baryshnikov says she misses “the days when it felt like New York actors were working recurring jobs on television all the time,” and not just those on the A-list.
“It feels really hard for people’s livelihoods and their health care,” she says. “But I’m always trying to look for a positive side.”
Certainly, keeping busy is one of the greatest positives of all.
A year out from Idiotka‘s festival premiere, Baryshnikov is poises to head back to SXSW with Sender, a thriller marking the feature directorial debut of Russell Goldman, where she stars alongside Severance‘s Britt Lower and Pluribus‘ Rhea Seehorn.
“I’m so excited to see it with an audience. I love that festival so much,” she says. “With Idiotka, my friends were like, ‘God, it’s so nice to see you in something that doesn’t terrify me.’ So Sender is a little bit of a return to some of the crazier sh*t.”
Upcoming, Baryshnikov also has roles in two other buzzy projects: Apple’s series adaptation of the iconic Scorsese film Cape Fear, as well as A24’s The Drama opposite Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.
Of where she finds herself now, she says: “I feel empowered to move forward with this feeling that if I love something, it’s possible. So I think I’m just looking for the next thing that makes me feel that way.”
Baryshnikov loves to write and has been developing projects for the screen she hopes will materialize, as she joins her character Margarita once again in putting herself out there.
“But acting-wise,” she says, “it’s kind of like dating. I’m just waiting to meet the right person.”
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