We were lucky to catch up with Polina Nikitina recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Polina thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

The first time I realized I wanted to be an actress, and I mean REALLY wanted to be an actress, was when I was ten. I have a very vivid image of it in my head, actually. I was in fifth grade, and we had this period of time every day where all of the students would sit at their desks and color or draw while our teacher walked around the classroom, reading a chapter book out loud. It sounds incredibly corny, but while I was coloring one day, it sort of just dawned on me. Something clicked within me, and it was solidified then and there. I remember rationalizing it as, “I love movies, and I love playing pretend, I’m going to be an actress!” And here I am, fifteen years later, still wanting to “play pretend”, and I absolutely love it.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Oh man, where do I begin?

A big, big, part of my life is my heritage. I was very young when my mother and I immigrated from Almaty, Kazakhstan, but I grew up in a Russian speaking household, and was surrounded by a lot of other immigrant families from various Soviet countries. My mom, however, has probably been the biggest contributor to the shaping of my identity and my craft. Besides the fact that she moved to a new country with only herself and a toddler in tow, working a full-time job and going to school while raising me, she cultivated my love for storytelling by constantly having late 90’s and early 2000’s rom-coms playing in the background. At four or five years old, I already loved movies like Dirty Dancing and Runaway Bride, which granted, were probably not the most age appropriate, but that’s neither here nor there. I did also love normal movies made for children, especially the Barbie movies, Thumbelina, and a handful of other Disney classics. I latched onto these pieces of film for DEAR LIFE. I would watch over and over, then go to my kindergarten class and re-enact scenes from Barbie: Princess and the Pauper or Swan Lake. I LOVED pretending to be a princess, or a mermaid, or the sister when we were playing family, like pretty much everyone else that was my age. The only difference, I guess, is that it has stuck years and years later.

I officially knew I wanted to act when I was ten, and started to take acting classes when I was around twelve. I really took on the “I want to be an actress” persona, I feel like everyone in my classes in middle school knew that’s what I wanted to do because I would not shut up about it. I’m really sorry to everyone that had to endure that. Around this time I also threw myself into reading. I’ve always been a big, big reader, but in my middle school days, I was finishing four to five books a week, AT LEAST. And then I would imagine that I was cast in the film adaptation of said book, and act scenes out by myself in my room. I’m not going to lie to you, I still do this. But safe to say my love for stories and maladaptive daydreaming have always been there.

When I was fourteen I auditioned for a Magnet School in the Arts, theatre specifically, got in, and thought that I had finally made it, even though it was only just a high school. I spent two years at that school, living out my life as a theatre kid, but ended up developing very negative feelings towards theatre and its process. Maybe I didn’t feel good enough, maybe it was the teachers, I don’t know, but it didn’t feel good anymore. So much drama, as being a teenager always is. So I spent my junior and senior year at a regular high school, doing regular high school stuff, thinking about normal jobs, and none of it stuck. I had absolutely no clue what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I graduated with a vague sense of maybe wanting to go into psychology, but that was about it. My mom had convinced me to go to community college, which I wasn’t happy about at the time but THANK GOD I did. I think it was my third or fourth semester of my first year when I enrolled in the theatre class that they offered, and I fell in love with acting all over again. The next semester I took on all the film study and theatre classes I could, and it was a really good time.

So much so that I ended up applying to Chapman University for Film Studies, got in, moved to Orange County, and then decided I didn’t want to go because it was so astronomically expensive. I did sign up for my first “big time” LA acting class during that time period though, driving 45 minutes to 2 hours every week to North Hollywood. I moved back home before I could finish the class in its entirety because I was not doing well mental health wise, but I did make a lot of good friends. It was kind of perfect timing because the pandemic hit a month after I moved home, but I still spent a lot of time feeling like a failure for moving back home and not achieving my dreams of being an actress. Reading also came back into my life during this time, and I fell so cripplingly in love with this book series that I went on TikTok, and made a video about how much I loved these books. I just needed to see if anybody else felt the same way. I didn’t have any followers or anything, I just needed to talk to someone about this series. Because it blew my world into smithereens. It was so magical and fantastical and romantic, and my reality was not, so all I could do was obsess and cry. As I started to talk more about it on TikTok, somehow my follower count started to go up. And then I started filming skits about these books, and that’s when I really started to gain traction, much to my surprise.

Then somehow, Spring of 2021, moving back to LA was on the table again. I’d watched a show that I fell in love with, looked up where the lead actress got her training, saw it was a UK school with a branch in LA, pushed through my existential anxiety, and applied to audition. I’ve always wanted to train like an English actor, the way they train is unmatched, and was thinking about moving to London before coming back to LA. But I’m very, very close with my mom, and that would be too far. A UK school in LA was literally the perfect in-between. I auditioned over zoom with the UK team, and found out a couple of weeks later that I got in.

Through universal timing, and a lot of anxiety, I moved to LA with my best friend in September of 2021. I spent the next two years training, building my confidence as an actor, and not to be corny, building really incredible friendships. I got a job in content creation for a romance author through one of my online book friends, and have also been doing that for the past two years. I LOVE my job because I get to be creative with my videos and talk about steamy books and it is more than I could have ever wished for. My personal TikTok following is almost at 50k which is absolutely bonkers to me. I read books and then post little skits about them, and the fact that people enjoy them means the world and more. I can’t believe it actually.

I’m currently navigating trying to find an agent and all that fun stuff, and it can be incredibly overwhelming. But I always come back to my love for this art-form, and it fuels me (ew, cliche, I know). But truly it does. This is a difficult industry. It’s heart-breaking, and gut-wrenching, but it is the LOVE for storytelling that will help you persevere.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

To stop apologizing. Not in the sense of doing something rude and refusing to apologize for it, but I have had to learn to stop being apologetic for who I am. My favorite acting tutor told me that the first time I worked with him, and had to tell me over and over until I finally started to get it. I’d walk into a space, and would immediately shrink myself. I’d start doing a scene, and I would do it the way I thought it was “supposed” to be done. I’ve never been shy, but I’ve always been terrified of doing the wrong thing. So I’ve always apologized for myself, for just…. BEING. There are a variety of places it stems from, from being excessively taunted throughout most of my adolescent life for being bigger to growing up in a household with some Soviet mentalities still intact, it’s all contributed to a sense of unworthiness within me that has made me apologize to everyone and everything my entire life. Of course something like that would bleed into my work but I didn’t realize how much until I actually started training. I definitely still struggle with it, but I am a much more confident actor than I was two or three years ago. I was provided a space where I could be bold with my artistic choices, and learn from them as well as the choices others made. I am very, very, grateful for that.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I didn’t mean to build an audience on social media, I mean that very honestly. It kind of just happened upon me. I started to create what I wanted to, and the audience came along with it, which is incredible. But I will say, and maybe this is public knowledge I don’t know, but it’s to find a niche. Mine happens to be books, specifically in the fantasy and romance genres. I also know that my skits have been my most viewed content, so if you find a content form that’s resonating, stick with it! I do also post whatever I want, and I think people like that candidness as well. Very, very, very corny but honestly just be you! Think about what kind of things you want to put out into the world, and start doing it! We’re all living on a floating rock just trying to have a good time, so why not, ya know?

Contact Info:

• Instagram: polinanikolay
• Other: tiktok- ladycassian

Image Credits
Matt Marcheski