What is it about Maria Bakalova and those goatish Republicans? In 2020, when she was 24, the Bulgarian actress starred as the 15-year-old daughter of Sacha Baron Cohen’s fictional Kazakh journo in Borat Subsequent Movie Film, her English-language debut, and inveigled the very real Rudy Giuliani into fiddling with his crotch on camera.
That movie premiered 11 days before the last presidential election. Bakalova now stars in another film unlikely to improve Donald Trump’s chances of returning to the White House. In Ali Abbasi’s mordant The Apprentice, which has just hit theaters despite Trump’s attempt to block it, Bakalova plays Ivana Trump opposite Sebastian Stan’s Donald, persuasively capturing the late Czechoslovakian skier-model’s metamorphosis from naïve girl-about-Manhattan to ambitious nouveau riche interior designer and chatelaine of Trump Tower.
“I didn’t know much about Ivana’s life when she was young before this project, so I came to the script clean,” Bakalova tells me. “O.K., she’s glamorous, she’s beautiful, and she might be a trophy wife and an ice queen, but I wanted to play her with dignity because we want to find someone we can empathize with.”
Sure enough, Bakalova came to empathize with Ivana’s struggle for the love of her husband against his Mephistophelian mentor, Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong in the film), Joe McCarthy’s notorious, rapacious head counsel during the Red Scare. “When we first meet Roy and Ivana, they’re enemies because they’re fighting over Donald in this polyamorous relationship,” Bakalova says. “It makes me shake when I watch it.”
“One of the most powerful moments is when these two people who don’t like each other unite against this creature Trump has become,” Bakalova adds, referring to a funereal dinner near the end of the film when Cohn is dying of complications from AIDS and Trump is shown at his cheapest. Bakalova uses the word “creature” advisedly—this Trump is a version of Frankenstein’s monster, with Cohn as creator and Ivana as terrified Bride.
With good reason. Drawing on Harry Hurt III’s 1993 Trump biography, which itself drew on Ivana’s sworn divorce deposition, the film depicts Trump’s alleged rape of her.
Abassi shot the scene matter-of-factly. “It always existed in the script,” Bakalova says. “It was difficult to read, difficult to do, and it’s difficult to watch. It’s disgusting, it’s gross, it’s painful, but I think it was my responsibility to portray it as realistically as possible. How do you continue after something like that? Because you cannot erase it, and the feeling of it will remain forever. But then these two people,” she marvels, “somehow put on a mask and pretend they’re this perfect couple.”
Asked how she got to be so daring, Bakalova initially demurs. “Um, I’m not sure how to answer that. I know I’m very sensitive, and I think that’s one of my biggest issues at the same time as it’s one of my qualities.” Then she says: “But … I am daring, Jesus Christ! I always feel, whether it’s real life or acting, that if you’re given the chance, you have to dare to jump, because, metaphorically, you can start flying if you jump high enough. But if you continue walking, you might fall on flat ground.
“We have a saying in Bulgaria,” she continues. “‘You don’t get a headache if you try.’ I have a tattoo on my leg that says, ‘Cap ou pas cap?’, which means, ‘Do you dare or not?’ I saw it in a French movie called Love Me if You Dare, and somehow”—she laughs—“it became the motto of my life.”
The Apprentice, starring Maria Bakalova, is in theaters now
Graham Fuller is a New York–based film critic
