Ballerina: Ian McShane on Raising Two Generations of Assassins in John Wick’s World of ‘Amazing Bullshit’

A young girl who has lost everything sits alone in a hallway. A kindly stranger in a sharp fedora notices her and the ballerina snow globe in her hands—perhaps her only friend in the world. “Do you like to dance?” he asks. “I know a school where they teach dances.”

So goes an early scene in the gloriously titled From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, the new spinoff from the John Wick franchise (in case you couldn’t tell). It is also the first moment in the film that intersects the story of young Eve (Victoria Comte and then Ana de Armas) to the larger franchise. After all, the man offering the orphan a lifeline is none other than Winston, the once and future proprietor of the Continental Hotel and the consummate gentleman played ever with a twinkle in his eye and a martini in his hand by Ian McShane.

It’s also an interesting scene for McShane to play, because while the previous four John Wick movies have at least partially revolved around the fatherly relationship Keanu Reeves’ titular assassin has with Winston, it is a kinship only told in inference. Three of those movies take place in roughly the span of a week. The fourth a short time later, and rarely do we get to know how deep John and Winston’s kinship goes. But with Eve, the sad child who will grow up to be Ana de Armas wielding a flamethrower, we see Winston come in and out of her life throughout the years as a mentor and avuncular presence.

“I think he sees an instant dynamic between how he feels about her [and John],” McShane says when we catch up with him ahead of Ballerina’s release. “He’s known John since he was a kid, I think, whether you believe he is in fact John Wick’s father.”

Indeed, McShane neither confirms nor denies the theories that Winston is the father of the Baba Yaga. He notes, however, that when Winston touches John’s supposed grave at the end of John Wick – Chapter 4, the hotelier says “dasvidaniya, moy syn,” Russian for “farewell, my son.” Either way though, there is a parallel between Eve, who is just starting out in Ballerina, and Reeves’ battle-hardened veteran who just like her is still struggling to surive an operatic underworld.

“It’s like two lost orphans, if you like, of this vicious system of an underworld, which we know little about,” McShane considers.

Yet while the system is viscous, and this underworld both mysterious and labyrinthine with its draconian rules and archaic customs, it is the heightened quality which McShane knows makes it so enjoyable. For instance, he dismisses out of hand reading Winston as introducing Eve to a ballet school that also doubles as an academy for assassins as anything other than merciful in a movie where grizzled hitmen can be eradicated with a book.

“It’s the only way he knows how to protect her from this so-called cult that’s been around forever in this ridiculous world created on screen,” McShane says before leaning in to chuckle, “When you think about it, only a film can build this imaginary, amazingly bullshit world that we invest emotionally into.”

That amazing BS is also a bit miraculous to McShane, who notes that when they made the first John Wick more than a decade ago, nobody was thinking this would go on for five movies and counting, or that this world would be anything more than the 100 or so minutes where Keanu exacted a bloody vengeance for the murder of a dog.

“The first movie was an independent movie, a small independent movie with a great script which Keanu had agreed to do, and then I was in it, and Willem Dafoe and Michael Nyqvist. But nobody thought there’d be a John Wick 2, you know?” In their own strange way, McShane relates the appeal of the John Wick movies to the kind of Hollywood escapism he savored as a child.

“I always loved movies since I was a kid,” McShane reminisces. “My mom and dad were big movie fans. I remember when they took me [for the first time] in the late ‘40s, sitting in that dark and then the screen coming up with a newsreel and a cartoon, and then a B-movie. Then you saw the main movie. It was like a total experience and I still go back to it, even if I am home watching a film on my big screen on my own, I still get invested.”

That can include even in a world where the snappily dressed gent saves a little girl from the orphanage by helping her become a prima ballerina assassin who at one point starts smashing plates over enemies’ heads like a modern day Three Stooges short. Who knows, maybe John and Winston watched exactly such entertainment while the Baba Yaga was growing up?

Ballerina is in theaters on Friday, June 6.