Following the ‘Anora’ Star, as He Rides the Oscar Wave

Mark Eydelshteyn was jolted awake on Saturday by two stylists who rapped on the door of his hotel room, then entered with several racks of clothing and a very large dog.

“The beginning of the fitting was a little bit awkward because I was in boxers,” Eydelshteyn, a 23-year-old Russian actor, explained that afternoon over a cigarette outside Samy’s Camera on Los Angeles’s Fairfax Ave.

While making his way through the camera shop, which he had visited multiple times to drop off rolls of film, patrons stopped him to tell him how much they had loved his performance.

“It’s impossible to be tired of it,” he said of the praise.

Eydelshteyn plays the alternately charming and snotty antagonist of “Anora,” a nominee for best picture at the Oscars on Sunday. Along with the rest of its cast, he had been outfitted in designer clothing and swept up in a months-long awards season campaign.

To a Hollywood newcomer like him, the social whorl had been exciting, disorienting and not always as glamorous as some might imagine, he said. Even playing a hedonistic party boy in “Anora” had not quite prepared him for the decathlon of schmoozing that is Oscars weekend.

“The last seven days are like a very strong wave,” he said, “and you have to be a surfer.”

Eydelshteyn is lithe and soft-spoken, with a cloud of pale brown hair that resembles a mushroom cap. (Nearly every American outlet that covers him refers to him as the “Russian Timothée Chalamet,” a label he seems to accept with some ambivalence.)