Meet Ukrainian Hollywood actress Ivanna Sakhno

ODESA, Ukraine — When Ukrainian Ivanna Sakhno came to Hollywood to pursue her dream of becoming an actress in the English-speaking world, she was only 15. Six years later, her name features on the credit reels of big-budget films with worldwide distribution.

“I remember being in my old childhood bedroom drawing the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, putting it on the wall and dreaming that maybe one day I will at least make it there,” Sakhno told the Kyiv Post in an interview on July 17 in Odesa.

Sakhno, 21, recently starred in the sci-fi monster film “Pacific Rim: Uprising,” produced by Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, and in the action comedy “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” where she worked alongside another Ukrainian actress, Mila Kunis.

While she lives in the United States, Sakhno occasionally visits her home country.

During one of these visits, she attended Ukraine’s biggest cinematography event, the Odesa International Film Festival, held this year on July 12–20.

Sakhno was invited to join the jury of the international competition program at the festival held in Odesa, a port city of 1 million people located 500 kilometers south of Kyiv.

Childhood dream

From her very early years in Kyiv, Sakhno has been surrounded by the world of cinema, growing up in a family parented by the director Halyna Kuvivchak-Sakhno and cinematographer Anatolii Sakhno.

Due to her parents’ involvement in the industry, Sakhno had her first role at the age of six. She starred in then-popular Ukrainian sitcom “Lesia + Roma.”

But it wasn’t her experience on the set that made her fall in love with the art of cinema. When Sakhno was eight, her mother showed her “Amélie,” a French romantic comedy. She was blown away and rewatched the film dozens of times.

After “Amélie,” Sakhno found herself attracted to the film industry outside of Ukraine.

“I wanted to explore it and also become part of it,” Sakhno says. “I began dreaming of moving into an English-speaking country and learning English and follow my dreams.”

As a kid, Sakhno learned about the “law of attraction,” a belief that positive thoughts bring positive experiences to people’s lives. She drew a Hollywood sign, pinned it to a wall in her bedroom in Kyiv, and started dreaming big.

She says that at the beginning she wasn’t even sure if a Ukrainian kid is allowed to visit the United States. Her first goal was to just make it there.
In several years, the 13-year-old Sakhno went to Canada for half a year to study English in a high school in Vancouver. She immersed herself in this new English-speaking environment and loved it.

Right before the end of the Canada journey, there was another milestone for her. She went to a workshop of a Hollywood casting director, who invited Sakhno to move to Los Angeles, offered her help there and, most importantly, encouraged her to follow the acting career path.

So at the age of 15, Sakhno moved to Los Angeles with her mother and went to the Beverly Hills high school. After graduating, she received a scholarship at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute. The school, which has two campuses in Los Angeles and New York, has many famous alumni, such as U.S. actor Chris Evans and actress Scarlett Johansson.

Breakthrough

Despite the general image of Hollywood as a cruel and extremely demanding world, Sakhno says she was lucky to not have encountered that. She says that she always felt safe and trusted her manager, as well as other people she worked with.

“I think that having the right people that believe in you, that have pure and wonderful intentions is one of the most important parts of any industry,” she says.

Her debut feature film in the U. S. was the horror movie “The Body Tree,” which came out in 2017, followed by another film of the same genre, “Can’t Take It Back” released soon after that. But her breakthrough came in 2018 when she starred in “Pacific Rim: Uprising.”

In it, Sakhno played a secondary role as cadet Viktoria, who co-pilots one of the massive robots, Jaegers, used to protect humanity from monstrous Kaiju that emerge from the seas.

Sakhno says that preparing for the role was extremely demanding physically — she had to train five days a week. Although it was hard, she says that she also got to discover abilities she hasn’t known of before.

“You become more and more familiar with your own mechanism the more you work, the more films you get to do,” she says.

Apart from that, it was Sakhno’s first time working with green screens and CGI, or computer-generated imagery.

“I didn’t have the chance to work on such a big high-end project before and the process of making a blockbuster film is so drastically different from making, for example, an indie film,” she says.

The movie grossed over $290 million.

Following the first big success for Sakhno, another U.S. film starring the actress, action comedy “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” hit cinemas in 2018.

Working with Kunis and comedy star Kate McKinnon, Sakhno played a Russian gymnast and assassin Nadejda. She says that the preparation was no less challenging, as she had to take boxing lessons, as well as explore the dark sides of her character.

“It really was a great pleasure to develop her (Nadejda) because she’s so in a way otherworldly,” she says.

Constant challenge

For a 21-year-old actress from a foreign country, Sakhno has been quite successful. But there are still challenges for her to overcome.

In both “Pacific Rim: Uprising” and “The Spy Who Dumped Me” she played foreigners. For someone out of the United States, mainly because of the accent, it’s not easy to get the role of a local and the number of foreign characters is, of course, limited.

In order to master the authentic pronunciation, Sakhno has studied American English ever since she moved. She even had to cut consuming content in Ukrainian and communication in her native language, even with her parents. Today she keeps studying dialects and accents.

“It’s tremendous work and it’s a never-ending process of watching films and listening to your own voice recording and understanding the issues with the sound you have to change,” she says.

Due to her persistence and hard work, Sakhno has already played roles of Americans two times.

Sakhno emphasizes she in no way is ashamed of her roots and the accent that came with them.

“If I wasn’t born in Ukraine I wouldn’t be who I am and it’s something that identifies me on a very high level,” she says. “I cherish my accent that I came with and I cherish that I get to work on it and develop other accents as well.”

Sakhno says that she looks forward to starring in all kinds of movies, not necessarily big-budget ones, and hopes to grow with every new film. Hollywood, which once was a far dream, became her everyday reality.

“It feels like home,” she says. “And it feels like a never-ending process of discovering myself through the work that I do.”