Back in the winter of 2018, just months before Maria Bakalova was due to graduate with a degree in drama from the Krastyo Sarafov National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria, she convinced her parents to take her on a trip to Denmark. “I wasn’t confident in my English, so I thought Hollywood would never happen,” says Bakalova. “I was looking at what was happening in Scandinavian cinema, or in Russian cinema, or in Italian cinema instead. And I was obsessed with Danish cinema: Thomas Vinterberg, Lars von Trier, all of the Dogme 95 films.”
Bakalova’s objective on this trip was to go to the offices of Lars von Trier’s production company, where she asked to be a PA or a runner on his next film. “They said, you would have to learn Danish, and I was like, okay, I’ll do it,” she adds. Fast forward a few months and Bakalova was attending an open call audition on Facebook for a mysterious Hollywood film seeking an Eastern European actress for a major role. “I thought, is this a legit audition? Or am I going to get kidnapped?” Bakalova laughs. “If there’s a role for Eastern Europeans, it’s usually going to be a hooker or a mob guy or a crazy Russian scientist with two or three lines here and there, not a multi-layered character that is going to be on screen for most of the film.”
At 5 a.m. on the morning after her graduation party, she took a flight to London for a callback, where she was greeted in the audition room by Sacha Baron Cohen. “Then I was like, okay, I know his face, so this must be real,” she says. A few months later and she had begun the life-changing experience of filming Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, the follow up to Baron Cohen’s riotous 2006 mockumentary. This time, the Kazakstahni reporter went back to the U.S. with the objective of offering up his daughter—played by Bakalova—as a diplomatic gift to a certain “Mikhael” Pence. (To reveal any more would be to ruin the film’s jaw-dropping surprises, as well as the array of unexpected cameos that spotlight both the best and the worst of today’s America.)
Currently, Bakalova is in London filming the latest Judd Apatow film; as soon as she wraps, she’ll be back off to the U.S. to film a horror movie produced by A24 and costarring Amandla Sternberg and Pete Davidson. It feels strange to think how much Bakalova’s life has transformed since that trip to Denmark—stranger still, it’s clear, to have lived it. “It’s been a rollercoaster,” Bakalova says. “I don’t even really know how to describe it. I’ve always been a dreamer, but I could never have dreamt all this.”
With her background lying primarily in the Bulgarian theater scene, the 24-year-old Bakalova has already spent half her life treading the boards, albeit mostly in dramatic roles. “My background is very serious,” she explains. “I’ve played a teenager with a pregnancy, a teenager with mental illness, a teenager with HIV, a teenager wanting to have a sexual relationship with her father. Comedy wasn’t my world, so it was so exciting when Sacha said I was funny. Maybe it’s just because I’m an awkward, weird person, I don’t know.”