His first roles were for German television-series, but quickly followed by movie offers such as the German comedy 1½ Knights - In Search of the Ravishing Princess Herzelinde along star Til Schweiger. The same year he also starred in the Swiss film Champions. This was followed by a role in the disaster movie Faktor 8 for German network ProSieben. By 2012 he also started being cast in international productions, most notably Andrey Malyukov's historical World War II soccer-drama Match and Fedor Bondarchuk's 3D-production Stalingrad, which was Russia's official entry for the foreign-language Oscars in 2013. He gained notoriety mainly through his starring role in "The Groom", the most successful Russian film 2016 in Russia with 3 million moviegoers and more than 20 million viewers of the free-TV premiere. In 2018 he played in the Russian war drama film Sobibor that is based on the real story that happened in 1943 in the Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland. The film was selected as the Russian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards.