Zsolt Trill spoke honestly about his adventurous life to hot! magazine.
hot!: His native village, Sárosoroszi, already existed in the Árpád era. What was life like there?
Zsolt Trill: Those who lived there lived off the land and agriculture. When I was a child, this village of a thousand people was already standing on several legs. There was a small cannery and a very rich brewery. My mother worked there, and later my father, a room painter with a great sense of humor, also moved there. “Sunny Transcarpathia” – that’s what the region was called, and people were happy to come there on vacation. They watched in amazement as all the fruits grew except bananas and oranges. The border was close: we listened to and watched Hungarian radio and television. Our Crusaders came from Pest several times a year, we gave each other gifts back and forth. Our childhood was cloudless and happy together with my sister.
hot!: Did this happiness include culture?
Zsolt Trill: An enormous amount of Hungarian TV movies have been made, and we’ve all seen them. It was an organic part of our life that we had amateur acting groups. There I saw the best performance of my life from The Miser. With the end of the Soviet Union, everything began to fall apart. They cut down the vines, there were no goods in the shops called Gastronom, people kept chickens themselves, there were 3-400 dairy cows in the village. But one village was still more beautiful than the other: flowers in front of the houses, fruit trees… I look back on those times with great fondness, I thank God that I grew up there.
“My mother meant to be a veterinarian”
hot!: Did your parents push for their children to continue their education?
Zsolt Trill: Every parent wants their child to do more. My sister became an English-history teacher. My father wanted me to learn to be a helicopter mechanic and then become a pilot. You would have to go to Moscow for that, and I didn’t know Russian very well either. My mother wanted me to be a vet – I was a short, thin child and I was terrified of blood. Aunt Erzsikemy teacher told her: “Karola dear, let your son go to secondary school in Muzsaly, and then you will decide what to do!” We performed with the school many times. Éva Vidnyánszky aunt – Attila his mother, my Hungarian teacher, regretted that I was no longer in the tenth grade, because that was when the Hungarian drama class started in Kiev. Then, luckily for me, it didn’t start until the following year, and Attila Vidnyánszky taught as a director. I had never seen a professional theater before. For a month, we were together with the forty selected from the four hundred applicants.
hot!: Did your later wife, Nelli Szűcs, also study in that class?
Zsolt Trill: We were 17 years old. Nelly he looked at me – I was small, 150 cm, blonde – and said: “But you are a beautiful boy! What beautiful children we would have!” Of course I protested in confusion. For a long time we were just friends, later we became a couple. In the first semester of the second year, when we went to Pest, I grew so much that my mother did not recognize me when I traveled home.
hot!: How did you come to Pest to the Academy of Performing Arts?
Zsolt Trill: As scholarship recipients, we spent a semester in Pest three times – they wanted us to be the core of Hungarian theater in Transcarpathia. 18 acting majors and 2 directing majors learned a lot Casimir from teacher and Dam also from the teacher.
Zsolt Trill received many promises
hot!: With what hopes was the Beregsász Gyula Illyés Theater founded?
Zsolt Trill: There were many promises, but nothing came of it. We didn’t have a theater building – we rehearsed in tiny places, in gymnasiums, and traveled the countryside. In Pest, our stipend was HUF 10,000 per month, in Beregszász we would have received a salary equivalent to HUF 1,000, but we didn’t get that either. The Hungarian state helped us, we took part in tenders in order to survive. And the parents were supportive: when it was Nellie’s birthday, they showed up with Zsiguli, meatballs and stuffed cabbage.
hot!: Are you actually married to nothing?
Zsolt Trill: He brought us together in Nagyszőlős on August 25, 2000 Father Tihamér. Nelli hitchhiked to Nyíregyháza to give birth on the 28th, and the next day I also hitchhiked to see my daughter.
hot!: Are Helga and Bertalan, four years younger, attracted to the theater?
Zsolt Trill: Our daughter was admitted to the Drama School, but she didn’t get in. She started university in Moscow, came back after a year, and studies in parallel at the Institute of International Relations of ELTE and at SZFE. Our son is studying sports management in Debrecen.
hot!: You are also connected to Debrecen and the theater.
Zsolt Trill: I first played at the New Theater for five years, István Márta in time. They were happy times, I laughed through them. Yet With Jiři Menzel I could also work! I came to Debrecen when Attila Vidnyánszky became the chief director there. But our relationship with the Beregsász theater didn’t end either: I went back, my wife played there.
hot!: Both signed to Attila Vidnyánszky’s National Theatre. In the meantime, they received all the accolades, this year you even won the Kossuth Prize.
Zsolt Trill: I’m not that interested in awards, although I am happy for all of them. What excites me is whether I did everything I could to make the performance good.
The Good Lord carries it in the palm of his hand.
We worked with Attila in such a way that we did not just prepare for one show at a time, but that the pieces would last for many years.
hot!: He played in quite a few films, from World Number to Toredék to Hadi. But as if the theater is more interesting than the cinema, the series…
Zsolt Trill: I feel safe in the theater. The film is often made in such a way that I get it here, I get it there. Of course, it depends on the director. Now with Gyula it was good to shoot. The Golden Life Dyga Zsombor I agreed for the sake of it. And if university students call me for an exam film, I’ll do it. But I’m not doing a series. I go to the theater a lot, and I regret that there is no passage between the theaters. I wonder what he’s doing Zsótér, Gabor Máté, what happens in Katona. As in my career so far, I can imagine that I will not only be playing in the direction of Attila Vidnyánszky.
