Oscar-nominee Maria Bakalova (Borat 2, The Apprentice) is one of the top up-and-coming actors in the industry.
That shouldn’t be surprising.
In 2020, she co-starred opposite Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat 2 and somehow managed to be even zanier and more unhinged than him in her portrayal of his pathologically sheltered daughter.
Her staunch commitment to the bits, which involved dehumanization, embarrassment, and high-risk, was handled with such confidence that watching the film, I truly believed she was the character:
But she’s not just great at playing bombastic.
She also has an immense ability to glide through scenes, like in her icy portrayl of Ivana Trump in The Apprentice (2024), where she bullies and charms Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong.
The first scene where she meets Trump (Stan) is shocking in how unreactive she is, which really winds him up. And then later we watch the soft shades of her crippling pain as the relationship tanks.
During our interview about her recent film Electra, a modern retelling of the Greek myth of the same name, Bakalova unpacks how she delivered a raw portrait of a performance artist who feeds off the megalomaniacal energy of a music star (Spencer’s Jack Farthing).
The film is highly improvised, and during the interview, Bakalova is as comfortable unpacking improv techniques as she is dishing on her love of Dogma 95.
Electra premieres in theaters today, May 2nd.
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