Palina Power, Talking

Palina Rojinski is the kind of person who seems designed for whatever medium she’s currently using. She made her name as a presenter on MTV Germany and Viva before moving through film roles, panel shows, and her own television formats, and she DJs under the name Palina Power in Berlin—a city she’s claimed as her own since moving there from her native Russia as a teenager. When she launched her podcast Podkinski on Spotify in early 2019, the conceit was simple: she talks to people she actually likes.

That’s rarer than it sounds. Most celebrity podcasts are either soft-focus press junkets or performed intimacy between famous people who are quietly promoting something. What Palina does is closer to what she’s always done well on screen—sit across from someone interesting and let the conversation go where it goes. Her early guests included the German-Turkish actor Fahri Yardim and the model and actress Stefanie Giesinger, and the appeal is exactly what she describes in the show’s premise: she opens with a Plato quote—In an hour of play, you can know a person better than in a year of conversation—and somehow it doesn’t come across as pretentious coming from her.

The podcast wave hit in roughly this order: nerds, then journalists, then public radio, then everyone else, then celebrities with varying degrees of self-awareness. By early 2019, every second person with a large following was releasing episodes. What Palina has that most of them lack is genuine ease on audio. The camera is gone and she doesn’t reach for it. The voice holds the room on its own.