Estonia has become the third country to declare Russian actor Ivan Okhlobystin persona non grata, following his violent, incendiary comments about homosexuality and Ebola.
You might remember the actor for his comments calling for the killing of gay people in ovens, saying they pose a "living danger" to his children. His recent comments focus on Ebola, and he has a theory that the disease is turning people into zombies; the actor cites cases where people killed by the virus had been "resurrected" days later.
Okhlobystin is best known for "Interns," a Russian sitcom derivative of "Scrubs." Before this role, he took a hiatus from acting to become a Russian orthodox priest.
The other two countries to have banned Okhlobystin are Latvia and Ukraine. In the latter case, he was also banned for supporting the Russian presence in Ukraine and Russia's annexation of the Black Sea Crimea peninsula.
Bafflingly, Okhlobystin seems to take the Estonian ban as a positive development, referring to his national bans as "stars," saying:
Our mole in the Capitol called, congratulated me on the third star…Thanks to the [U.S] State Department for a high evaluation of my achievements.
Easy as it may be to dismiss Okhlobystin as a mentally unstable attention seeker, it's worth pointing out that the actor/priest harbors political ambitions, and he is popular enough in his native Russia to have drawn applause from a packed crowd in making his aforementioned call for violence against gays.
