section_path: Entertainment career
section_name: Entertainment career
paragraph_text: Entertainment career
  
  At age 17, Zelenskyy joined his local team competing in the KVN comedy competition. He was soon invited to join the united Ukrainian team "Zaporizhzhia-Kryvyi Rih-Transit," which performed in the KVN's Major League and eventually won in 1997. That same year, he created and headed the Kvartal 95 team, which later transformed into the comedy outfit Kvartal 95. From 1998 to 2003, Kvartal 95 performed in the Major League and the highest open Ukrainian league of KVN, and the team members spent a lot of time in Moscow and constantly toured around post-Soviet countries.
  
  Zelenskyy and Kvartal 95 left KVN in 2003, after Zelenskyy declined a job offer from KVN's Russian management that would have required him to abandon Kvartal 95, and after an incident where a Russian KVN producer used an antisemitic insult against Zelenskyy on stage. That same year, Kvartal 95 started producing TV shows for the Ukrainian TV channel 1+1, and in 2005, the team moved to the Ukrainian TV channel Inter.
  
  In 2008, he starred in the feature film Love in the Big City, and its sequel, Love in the Big City 2. Zelenskyy continued his movie career with the film Office Romance. Our Time in 2011 and with Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon in 2012. Love in the Big City 3 was released in January 2014. Zelenskyy also played the leading role in the 2012 film 8 First Dates and in sequels that were produced in 2015 and 2016. He recorded the voice of Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian dubbing of Paddington (2014) and Paddington 2 (2017).
  
  Zelenskyy was a member of the board and the general producer of the TV channel Inter from 2010 to 2012. Later in 2018, Zelenskyy said that then-President Yanukovych had offered him US$100 million for political control of Kvartal 95's programmes after he became general producer of Inter, but Zelenskyy refused.
  
  After Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, Kvartal 95 closed its office in Moscow and began shutting down business ties with Russia; Zelenskyy himself stopped working in Russia by the end of 2014. By Zelenskyy's estimation, this reduced Kvartal 95's average revenue per hour of TV programming from $200,000 to $30,000. From 2014, Kvartal 95 also began visiting the war zone to perform for Ukrainian soldiers at the front. After Ukrainian media reported that Zelenskyy's Kvartal 95 had donated ₴ 1 million to the Ukrainian army after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War, some Russian politicians and artists petitioned for a ban on his works in Russia.
  
  In August 2014, Zelenskyy spoke out against the intention of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture to ban Russian artists from Ukraine. Since 2015, Ukraine has banned some Russian artists and Russian media and art from entering Ukraine. In 2018, the romantic comedy Love in the Big City 2 starring Zelenskyy was banned in Ukraine due to the film not following the Law of Ukraine "On Cinematography", as it included a blacklisted Russian actor.
  
  In 2015, Zelenskyy became the star of the television series Servant of the People, where he played the role of the president of Ukraine. In the series, Zelenskyy's character was a high-school history teacher in his 30s who won the presidential election after a viral video showed him ranting against the government corruption in Ukraine. The comedy series Svaty ("In-laws"), which Zelenskyy co-produced, was banned in Ukraine in 2017, but unbanned in March 2019.
  
  In 2016, while he was serving as the Artistic Director of Kvartal 95, Zelenskyy was a co-presenter of the Teletriumph Awards, the national television awards of Ukraine, alongside Masha Efrosynina. Teletriumph 2016 was held at Freedom Hall, and was not televised. He also had to leave the stage to accept his own award that night. However, the television channel that Kvartal 95 had been associated with, Inter, and their parent company Inter Media Group, boycotted the event and did not participate in the nomination process due to disputes within the Ukrainian television industry and the awards organizers. Zelenskyy reportedly delivered a biting punchline about the boycott. The president of Inter Media Group then circulated a press release in response.
  
  Zelenskyy worked mostly in Russian-language productions. His first role in the Ukrainian language was the romantic comedy I, You, He, She, which appeared on the screens of Ukraine in December 2018. The first version of the script was written in Ukrainian but was translated into Russian for the Lithuanian actress Agnė Grudytė. Later, the movie was dubbed into Ukrainian.