Maria Bakalova at the Cannes Film Festival. “I always feel, whether it’s real life or acting, that if you’re given the chance, you have to dare to jump,” she says.

Ave Maria!

She got Rudy Giuliani to fiddle with his crotch in the Borat sequel. Now Maria Bakalova steals the show as Ivana Trump in the new movie The Apprentice

By Graham Fuller

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.