Anton Lapenko

Biography: Anton Vyacheslavovich Lapenko (born on September 1, 1986 in Zelenograd, Moscow, USSR) is a Russian film and theater actor. In 2019 Lapenko became famed as an author of humorous Instagram sketches, styled as retro VHS videos. Characters played by Lapenko include a self-doubting engineer, a journalist producing the TV show The Mystery of the Hole, and an eccentric steamroller driver Igor Katamaranov. By January 2020, Lapenko's channel had 1,500,000 subscribers. In December 2019 Lapenko published the movie series Within Lapenko on YouTube. The series were created by him (he also played all of the characters) alongside comedian Aleksei Smirnov (the screenwriter and film director). The plot is based on the life and adventures of characters from Lapenko's Instagram videos. According to the authors' presentation of the series, it is styled like late Soviet movies and isn't set in a particular time, but rather features a universe which combines the 1980s and 1990s. Egor Maksimov from Maxim Online referred to the series as a parody of all genres of Soviet TV. Lapenko is compared to Leonid Gaidai and to Monty Python, not in the least due to his absurdist humour.