MARIA BAKALOVA
Borat 2 breakout star MARIA BAKALOVA on her remarkable journey from obscurity to an unlikely Academy Award nod
The most unlikely — though fully deserved — Oscar nominee in years talks improvising with Sacha Baron Cohen. Great success!
WHEN MARIA BAKALOVA found out she was going to the Oscars, she was with Pedro Pascal. To be more specific, she was on the set of Judd Apatow’s forthcoming The Bubble, performing a scene with Pascal, having politely nixed suggestions that shooting be paused so she could watch the nominee announcements on TV. “I had said, ‘No, please! I just want to keep working.’ But I started freaking out: my hands were in the shot, and you could see they were shaking.” Then Apatow, who had been sneakily following the broadcast, asked her to look into the camera and said, “Congratulations. You just got nominated for an Academy Award.” The freaking-out process was complete. “I lost my mind!” Bakalova laughs. “Even in my wildest dreams I couldn’t imagine something that amazing. It’s insane.”
Not long ago, the 24-year-old was a jobbing Bulgarian actor, filling roles such as ‘Girl In Taxi’ and ‘Dream Girl’. Then she heard about a Hollywood film doing a casting call and sent off a tape “as a joke”. Suddenly, she was being flown to London to meet a casting agent. “My mum said, ‘They’re going to kidnap you! I’m never going to see you again!’” she says, recalling how much the whole thing felt like a humantrafficking scheme. “Let’s be honest: things like this are usually not happening for people with my accent. When I went into the house to audition, I was going to put my phone on recording and drop it under a table so my manager could find it later as proof.”
Instead, she was offered the plum supporting role in the Borat sequel, playing the deranged
Kazakh’s daughter Tutar. Travelling around America with Sacha Baron Cohen, Bakalova proved fearsomely committed, growing out her body hair and throwing herself into wild, nerve-wracking scenarios, including a ‘fertility dance’ at a society ball featuring unexpected menstrual blood. “After the stress of that, I got sick; my immune system dropped,” she says. “But it’s an important scene because why as a woman in the 21st century should I be ashamed of having a period? Why is it still a stigma?” Then there was the now-legendary scene involving her alone with Rudy Giuliani, which ends with the former New York mayor seemingly tugging his trousers down. “I was able to hear my heart racing like crazy,” says Bakalova. “But Sacha, thank God, had told me, ‘Use your nerves. Try to convert them in a way that they’re gonna help you.’”
She succeeded in that, and now she’s heading towards another wild, nerve-wracking scenario: the 93rd Academy Awards, held in an LA train station on 25 April. A bonus: her on-screen dad will be there too. “I haven’t seen Sacha since October, when we went to do Good Morning America,” she says. “That’s the other reason why I’m extremely excited for the Oscars.” Expect an emotional reunion. And maybe some dancing of a more conventional sort. BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM IS ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO NOW. THE ACADEMY AWARDS ARE ON SKY CINEMA AND NOW ON 25 APRIL