Antonis Myriagkos

Chios, Montreal and a route in through painting

Antonis Myriagkos was born on Chios on 31 October 1973 and grew up between Montreal and Athens. He did not arrive at acting through a drama school at eighteen. He went first to the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he studied painting under Dimosthenis Kokkinidis and Dimitris Mytaras, and only afterwards trained as an actor at the drama school of the Embros Theatre Laboratory, with Anna Makraki, Dimitris Katalifos and Tasos Bantis among his teachers.

The two disciplines never fully separated. For the opening ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics he worked on the Klepsydra segment as painter, costume designer and make-up artist, a credit that sits oddly on an actor's CV and explains a good deal about the kind of theatre he would go on to make: work in which the image on stage carries as much weight as the line.

He still paints, and he maintains a personal site under the transliteration Antonis Miriagos, where the stage credits and the canvases are listed side by side rather than in separate careers.

Twenty years at Attis

Since 2005 Myriagkos has worked with the Attis Theatre and its founder Theodoros Terzopoulos, and that association is the spine of his stage biography. Terzopoulos's method — breath, the body under pressure, chorus as a physical engine rather than a decorative frame — is unusually demanding, and it has taken the company and its actors well outside Greece.

The touring record is specific. Sophocles' Ajax opened in Beijing in 2008 and went on to Spain and Cyprus. Throne of the Atreidae played the Athens Festival in 2011. Prometheus Bound was staged at the 6th Theatre Olympics in Beijing in 2014, and Antigone was performed at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia in 2015. The Trojan Women followed at the 9th Theatre Olympics in 2019, and Seneca's Thyestes returned him to the Athens Festival in 2023.

Alongside the Greek and Roman repertoire he has worked on contemporary text, including Jon Fosse's Someone Is Going to Come — a play built almost entirely on dread and withheld information, which turns out to be a good description of where his casting has landed since.

What that background bought him was a reputation among directors rather than among television audiences. For most of two decades he was a name known to people who go to the Athens Festival and to the Theatre Olympics, and to almost nobody else.

Kapodistrias, and the largest audience of his career

That changed on 25 December 2025, when Giannis Smaragdis released Kapodistrias with Myriagkos in the title role — Ioannis Kapodistrias, the Corfiot diplomat in the Russian court who became the first governor of the Greek state. The film runs 128 minutes and was distributed by Tanweer.

It sold 144,712 tickets across Greece in its first four days, the biggest opening of any film in the country in 2025 and the largest of Smaragdis's career. The critical response ran the other way. Athinorama's reviewer Christos Mitsis gave it one and a half stars out of five and called it hagiography "scripted by Wikipedia", faulting a hero drawn without moral complexity. The gap between the box office and the notices became a story in its own right in the Greek press through January 2026, with Smaragdis publicly dismissing his detractors.

Myriagkos handled it differently. Asked about the reviews, he said criticism was doing its job — that it exists to raise problems and to name weaknesses as well as merits — and that what he objected to was not judgement but blanket dismissal. It is a measured position for an actor carrying a film that was being used as a proxy for an argument about Greek cinema, and it did his standing no harm.

The near-silent Count

His stage work that season went in the opposite direction from the biopic. On 22 October 2025 Dracula opened at the Porta Theatre in Athens, adapted and directed by Thanos Papakonstantinou from Bram Stoker, with Myriagkos as the Count alongside Angela Brouskou, Argyris Pantazaras, Dimitris Drosos, Sissy Toumasi, Margarita Alexiadi, Thodoris Vrachas, Vasilis Boutsikos and Dimitris Psyllos.

The production ran about eighty minutes without an interval and refused the gothic furniture entirely. Niki Psychogiou's design put four transparent perspex coffins on stage behind a large translucent curtain that split the action into a front and a back layer; a revolve in the second half closed each character into a separate cell. Antis Skordis wrote the score, Eliza Alexandropoulou lit it, and a repeating mechanical pulse like an amplified heartbeat ran underneath.

Reviewing it on 6 January 2026, Giannis Tsitsimis described Myriagkos as an almost wordless acrobat-Count who watches the others destroy themselves and works through presence rather than action — and argued that the show belonged to a postmodern art theatre with a narrower audience in Greece than its quality deserved. A November 2025 notice on Keysmash took the lighter view, praising the sound, lighting and choreography, singling out the decision to make Van Helsing female and Dracula's brides male, and reporting a good night out.

Two roles in three months, then: a saint in a widescreen biopic and a silent predator behind perspex. Between them they describe the range better than any single credit.

Where he is right now

Since 20 September 2026 Myriagkos has been on Mega every week in Dyo Mavra Poukamisa (Two Black Shirts), which launched with a double episode at 21:00. Adapted by Emmanouella Alexiou from Menios Sakellaropoulos's novel and directed by Marios Karamanis and Kostas Kimoulis, it begins in 1980s Crete with a buried crime. He plays Sifis, a schoolteacher who comes back to the village after his mother's death, opposite Vasilis Bisbikis as Manousos and Marianna Kimouli as Markella, the woman who breaks the two men apart.

Talking to Ta Nea on 5 September 2026, he described Sifis as someone who swallows what he feels rather than saying it — "this accumulation and restraint can sometimes lead to a dead end" — and as a man who puts his family and his friend ahead of himself until that stops being sustainable. On whether a great love is worth risking everything for, he answered that it is worth investing in one even when it looks unrealistic, because living it matters more than avoiding it out of fear of the pain.

From 9 October 2026 he is back on stage at the Theatro Athinon on Voukourestiou Street in Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, playing Roberto opposite Athina Maximou as Paulina and Aimilios Chilakis as Gerardo. It is a three-hander about a torture survivor who believes she recognises the voice of the man now sitting in her living room, and it puts him once more in the role of the visitor nobody can read.