His father is a film director, Sergei Bodrov, and his mother Valentina Nikolayevna was a fine art expert.

Bodrov wanted to enrol in the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, but his father advised him that "cinema is a passion, and if you don't feel it you should either wait for it or forget about it forever.

[6] After becoming an actor and television host he completed and defended (in 1998) his graduate thesis entitled "Architecture in Venetian Renaissance Painting" and received the Candidate of Sciences degree.

In 1991, while still a student, Bodrov studied art in Italy, where he found work as a lifeguard and earned money to support his travels around the country.

He appeared on screen only for a few minutes, playing a minor lawbreaker who was waiting for a decision on his own fate while sitting next to the main hero of the film.

Bodrov received an award for best actor jointly with Menshikov at the Kinotavr cinema festival in Sochi.

He said that he left the show feeling it had given him a good schooling:[6]I became acquainted with so many people, heard so many stories, read so many letters - it doesn't happen in other jobs.

But a metaphor connected with him forms in my mind: I imagine people in a primitive chaos, who sit in their cave before the fire and do not understand anything else in their life except for the responsibility to eat and to reproduce.

[5] The music to the movie was composed by the Russian rock band Nautilus Pompilius, which Sergei himself enjoyed listening to.

Bodrov received the award for Best Actor at the movie festivals in Sochi and Chicago and got the "Golden Aries" prize.

The movie was regarded by many in Russia as culturally significant and for many of the younger generation, Bodrov's character Danila Bagrov became a hero and a role model.

[6] Over the course of 1998–99, Sergei starred in two relatively minor films, the first was in Pavel Pavlikovsky's movie, a joint UK-Russia production, The Stringer, with British actress Anna Friel.

[10] Bodrov played Vadik Chernyshov, an impoverished 'stringer', who dreams of filming something to interest the western news channels.

Friel played the role of Helen, a British media executive, as the two begin a romance against the backdrop of the world of journalism, and cultural differences, in the romantic thriller.

The second was in Régis Wargnier's movie East/West, in which Sergei played Sasha, a neighbour of the central couple in the film, Dr Golovin and his French wife Marie, in a communal apartment during the Stalin era.

[9] The Americans make movies about Russians where Schwarzenegger as a policeman tears off a mafioso's wooden leg and drugs fall out of it, and bears are walking in the streets.

Sergei played Dima – the head of security for a rich American of Russian ancestry – Oleg (Mashkov).

His father suggested the idea of the movie to him and Bodrov Jr wrote the screenplay in two weeks; four days later filming began.

The heart of the movie is a story of two sisters – Sveta (thirteen years old) and Dina (eight), who become inadvertent victims of their father's criminal past.

The movie is called 'The Messenger' and I'm like a coffee in a carton in it: the author of a screenplay, stage manager and performer of the leading role.