Aimilios Cheilakis

The Koun school, and a slow build

Aimilios Cheilakis was born on 18 December 1970 and trained at the drama school of the Karolos Koun Art Theatre, graduating in 1991 on a scholarship. That school has supplied Greek theatre with much of its acting spine for six decades, and its stamp is visible in the career that followed: text first, ensemble discipline, and a readiness to move between Molière, Sophocles and Shakespeare rather than settling into a single register.

His early stage record runs through the classical repertoire. He appeared in The Misanthrope across 1996 to 1998, Don Juan in 2010 and 2011, Hamlet in 2011, Oedipus the King the same year, Philoctetes in 2014, The Caucasian Chalk Circle in 2014 and 2015, Lysistrata in 2016 and 2017, Iphigenia in Aulis in 2017, A Midsummer Night's Dream in 2019 and Othello in 2021. The Oedipus was staged at Epidaurus with an all-male company, and remains the production he is most often measured against.

He married the actress Athena Maximou in 2006. She has become his most constant stage partner; of the three productions he has been involved in over the past twelve months, she is in all three.

Screen work, and the role that made him known

Cheilakis reached a national audience through television rather than theatre. The series that did it was Mirella Papaeconomou's The Life I Never Lived; he has since worked across a long list of Greek drama series including The Island and Wild Bees, the sort of credits that mean a rooftop theatre audience in Ampelokipoi recognises him before he opens his mouth.

In film he appeared in Kavafis in 1996, From the Edge of the City in 1998, Female Company in 1999, and in 2001 both Captain Corelli's Mandolin and August 15th. More recently he was in Captain Michalis in 2023. The screen work has never displaced the stage — it has funded and publicised it, and it explains why productions he co-directs can fill a summer tour of thirteen or more Greek towns without an established title to sell them.

The Dounias partnership

The through-line of Cheilakis's recent work is his collaboration with the director and translator Manolis Dounias. The two share billing as co-directors on most of what Cheilakis now puts on, and Dounias directs alone when Cheilakis is carrying a heavy acting load. It is a working method more than a company: Dounias handles the translation and the shape, Cheilakis the performance and a good deal of the staging, and the same designers recur — Alexia Theodoraki on costume, Nikos Sotiropoulos and Nikos Vlasopoulos on light.

Their most demanding piece together is Monos me ton Amlet — Alone with Hamlet — a solo adaptation in which Cheilakis plays Hamlet, Ophelia, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Laertes, Horatio and the Ghost across eighty minutes. Dounias and Cheilakis adapted and directed it from Giorgos Himonas's translation, with original music performed live on stage by Dimitris Kamarotos, movement by Phaedra Daioglou and design by Theodoraki. After an eight-year gap it was revived on 20 June 2025 at the Kipos Theatre in Papagou and then toured, taking in Crete, Thessaloniki and an open-air staging in the courtyard of the Palace of the Grand Master in Rhodes.

Reviewers treated the revival as the severest form of the job — one actor, one text, one musician — and credited Kamarotos's score with carrying the psychological weather that a single performer cannot supply alone.

#Cancel, and a season of provocation

For the 2025–26 winter season Cheilakis took on David Ireland's Ulster American, staged in Athens as #Cancel. It opened on 2 October 2025 at the Theatro Athinon on Voukourestiou Street, translated and directed by Dounias, with Cheilakis, Maximou and Thanasis Kourlambas as the three characters — an Oscar-winning American actor, an ambitious English director and a Northern Irish writer — who meet in an empty theatre and tear each other apart over political correctness, cultural identity and who is permitted to speak for whom.

The run revived the theatre's old habit of midnight performances on Fridays, alongside a 6pm Saturday matinee, with tickets from €13 to €25 and a first-week release of a hundred seats at the bottom price. Greek critics rated Cheilakis's performance among the strongest of his recent stage work, and read Ireland's play as a text that implicates its audience rather than flattering it.

It was during that run, on 15 January 2026, that Cheilakis spoke on the television programme Happy Day about a health matter affecting him and those close to him, calling 2026 a very difficult year and declining to give any detail. He has not returned to the subject publicly since, and has worked continuously through the year.

The summer of the farce

The current work is a deliberate turn away from the severity of Hamlet and Ireland. Takounia ston Valto — Heels in the Swamp — is a new political comedy by the playwright Akis Dimou, co-directed by Dounias and Cheilakis, which opened on 2 June 2026 on the rooftop of the Lampeti theatre on Leoforos Alexandras. Five characters — a minister, his shoe-obsessed wife, an opposition politician, a writer and a journalist — wait for the prime minister to arrive at a wedding-anniversary reception while the private and public dirt comes out.

Athinorama's Tonia Karaoglou, reviewing on 18 June 2026, found the opening slow to settle but the production's rhythm sharply improved thereafter, singling out Maximou's minister's wife, Marianna Toumasatou's repeated announcements of arriving guests as the best sustained gag of the evening, and Cheilakis's timing as a man straining to look serious. Writing in Documento on 24 June 2026, Iraklis Logothetis placed the piece in the boulevard line of Feydeau, Labiche and Sacha Guitry, praised the directness of Cheilakis's cynical minister, and objected that some forced repetitions interrupt the momentum.

The production toured hard between the Athens dates: Kalamata on 18 June, a run through Kozani, Ioannina, Trikala, Katerini, Thessaloniki, Polygyros and Veroia from 10 to 19 July, then Lavrio, Chalkida and Larissa to the end of the month, Oropos and Aegina on 1 and 2 August, and Volos on 3 September.

What comes next

The Lampeti run closes on 23 September 2026. Sixteen days later, on 9 October, Cheilakis opens at the Theatro Athinon in Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, again co-directed with Dounias, with Maximou and Antonis Myriagkos completing the three-hander. It is a return to the interrogation-room register of #Cancel: a woman confronting the man she believes tortured her, with no reliable way for the audience to settle who is telling the truth.

Beyond that, he has confirmed a return to Oedipus in the summer of 2027, roughly fifteen years after the Epidaurus production of Oedipus the King that made his reputation in ancient tragedy. Taken together — a farce, a psychological thriller and a tragedy inside eighteen months — the schedule reads as the work of an actor who has stopped choosing between his registers and simply books all of them.