Maria Bakalova, as Ivana Trump, is trying to provoke you

The 28-year-old Bulgarian actress, who got an Oscar nomination for her joyful, feral, improvised performance opposite Sacha Baron Cohen as a young Kazakhstani girl escaping patriarchy in 2020’s “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”— and duping Rudy Giuliani in an infamous scene — was luckily on her way to a hair appointment when she got the call. She told the stylist she was up for a part she really wanted, but couldn’t talk about, and pleaded for him to help her get volume in her hair. Lots and lots of volume.

He teased and blow-dried and hair-sprayed, and the next day, Bakalova spent three hours making it even bigger. Then she threw on a full face of makeup and stepped onto the sidewalks of New York at high noon. “I was dying out of shame just going out and walking in this crazy makeup and hair and everything,” she says.

“The first time I met Maria in person, she shows up in this really strange oligarch-meets-hooker look,” Abbasi says. “I was like, ‘Wow, what’s going on here?’” Later, recounting the story at a screening in L.A., he adds, “I was like, ‘No wonder Giuliani fell in love with you.’”

Written by Vanity Fair journalist Gabriel Sherman, “The Apprentice” is essentially a Trump origin story, starring Sebastian Stan of Marvel fame in prostheses, a blond wig and increasingly orange makeup. It chronicles Donald Trump’s rise as a young real estate magnate in the ’70s and ’80s under the tutelage of vicious lawyer Roy Cohn — who is “by many considered one of the worst humans of the 20th century,” as Jeremy Strong, who plays him, told Stephen Colbert recently. The movie posits that the rules and worldview Trump still uses to this day came directly from Cohn: (1) Attack. Attack. Attack. (2) Admit nothing. Deny everything. (3) Always claim victory and never admit defeat.

Sandwiched into the film’s student-mentor love story is Trump’s first wife, Ivana, the late Czech model and businesswoman who married him in 1977; raised their three children, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric; divorced him in 1990 after his affair with model and actress Marla Maples, whom he married after she gave birth to their daughter, Tiffany (Melania is wife No. 3); and is now buried at his golf course in Bedminster, N.J. She’s also at the center of one of the movie’s most harrowing scenes, when Trump rapes his wife after an argument, which is based on a deposition Ivana gave under oath during their divorce. She later walked back the allegations and said she “felt violated.” Sherman says he kept it in the script because he felt it represented Ivana’s “emotional truth.”

Going into that New York meeting in 2022, Bakalova was sure she wouldn’t get the part. But she felt a connection to this hard-driving Eastern European woman who fell in love with the Queens-born son of a real estate scion and then watched him lose his humanity. Embodying Ivana wasn’t just about putting on an accent, which is different from the one Bakalova still has, but about knowing what it’s like to be an immigrant, one not born in privilege, who came from a communist or post-communist country, and the kind of bar you have to set for yourself never to fail. And how, with each achievement, that bar gets higher and requires you to shed more pieces of yourself.

“I couldn’t think of anybody better suited for that part,” Stan says. “I think there’s an authenticity that Maria brought and a real sense of understanding what it means to come to this country and to try and have an opportunity.” In the time between her casting in December 2022 and when they shot in November 2023, he says, they were constantly writing each other and sending each other videos and talking about the relationship. “I was just really taken with how fearless and dedicated she was to capturing everything that Ivana was experiencing.”

It’s a role that few American actresses would dare to tackle, particularly at Bakalova’s age, or this early in a career. The movie is considered so much of a “third rail,” as Strong has put it, that every major U.S. studio and streamer declined to buy and release it. The film is only hitting theaters now after a lengthy legal and monetary battle that involved the film indirectly being held hostage by former Commanders owner (and Trump supporter) Daniel Snyder, who financed the production company run by his son-in-law that was the movie’s primary U.S. funder.

Jimmy Kimmel joked to Stan that he would need to move back to Romania, where he was born, once the movie comes out. But Bakalova evades when asked whether she has experienced any blowback from playing Ivana. If she wasn’t up for the challenge, she says, she wouldn’t be an actress.

“We take risk every day when we go and cross the street, and I think that’s what makes you feel alive,” she says. “Maybe it is dangerous. But what isn’t dangerous? I think it’s better to do something and then deal with the consequences, instead of always having to ask yourself: ‘What would have happened if I did this movie? What would have happened if I actually [had] been more outspoken, provocative?’ Because I honestly believe that art should provoke people. That’s why we have it.”

Bakalova is, as she feared, incredibly young-looking and fresh-faced. She was so nervous for what she says is her first-ever in-person profile interview (her entire “Borat” Oscars season was on covid-era Zoom) that she says she showed up 20 minutes early to the coffee shop and hid outside. She is wearing a loose and very chic brown plaid menswear suit, chunky loafers, and long, red, pointy press-on nails that could claw your eyes out — which she says help her get into the mood to talk about Ivana.

She moved to West Hollywood, she says, because its walkability suits her European sensibilities. Plus, she doesn’t have a U.S. driver’s license or know how to bike. “Everything that’s dangerous on the emotional side, the mental side, I’m there,” she says. “Physically, not so much.” (Although she has tested out her physical comedy skills in the blood-spattered Gen Z murder mystery “Bodies Bodies Bodies” opposite Pete Davidson and Rachel Sennott, and, in motion capture, as Cosmo the Russian astronaut dog in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.”)

Bakalova was still living in Bulgaria, had never been to the States and was so shy about her English skills that she could barely bring herself to ask anyone for the time when her breakout role as 15-year-old Tutar in the “Borat” sequel became all anyone in Hollywood could talk about.

The Baron Cohen satire, in which the actors prank unsuspecting Americans, is essentially a coming-of-age saga for Tutar, the daughter whom Baron Cohen’s titular journalist hopes to give as a gift to Vice President Mike Pence. In the mostly improvised film, Bakalova sleeps in a cage meant for a farm animal and asks Baron Cohen: “Is this cage nicer than Melania’s?”

And she made international news for a scene in which she interviews Rudy Giuliani about Trump in a hotel suite and then invites him for a drink in the bedroom. The president’s personal lawyer is caught on camera patting her lower back and lying down on the bed while putting his hand down his pants — before Baron Cohen bursts in wearing women’s lingerie to save her.

“She was quite anxious beforehand,” Baron Cohen says. “I remember telling her, ‘If you’re able to complete the scene, you’re going to be nominated for an Oscar!’”

(Giuliani has said he called the cops after realizing he had been “set up” and was merely lying down to tuck in his shirt after removing a lavalier microphone.)

“I think ‘Borat’ works on many levels as a social experiment, so people just reveal their true colors in a setup like this,” says Bakalova, declining to elaborate further on what happened, except to say that she was extremely nervous that she would get covid or something worse might happen. “And if you’re a good person, you’re going to show up as a good person. If you are not very reasonable, you will be seen as not reasonable, right?”

That the woman who became famous for duping Trump’s lawyer in the “Borat” sequel is now playing Trump’s first wife in “The Apprentice” seems downright genius. But Abbasi says that financiers fought him all the way on it.

They said she wasn’t bankable, or feared she could only do comedy, or complained she has an accent (“I’m like, ‘Yeah, you f---ing bet she has an accent!’” Abbasi says). One investor no longer associated with the project gave the director a list of famous blond actresses he wanted for the role. It turned out, Abbasi says, that the investor’s father was friends with Giuliani. “So they were trying to trick me into dumping [Bakalova] because they didn’t want to piss him off.”

A year passed from the moment Bakalova got the part in December 2022 to when “The Apprentice” was shot in Toronto for six weeks. During that downtime, Bakalova devoured every book Ivana had written, every interview she had given, learning to mimic her gestures and working with a dialect coach to perfect her accent.

Ivana, she believes, felt compelled by Trump’s relentless, yet respectful, pursuit of her. (One of the movie’s biggest laugh moments is when Stan as Trump follows Ivana to Aspen to ask her out, and then falls flat on the ice.) Bakalova sees Ivana as a second “antagonist” alongside Cohn in the story, a catalyst for Trump’s transformation from a bumbling young man who couldn’t stand up to his father into a confident developer who thinks he can run roughshod all over city hall. Each of them built his confidence, and then felt the coldness of Trump’s disrespect as he turned his back on them.

The rape scene, she says, felt incredibly important to all of them; it was also toned down from Ivana’s account in which she claimed he pulled out a chunk of her hair. “I think it’s important to have it and to dive deeper into how people can change and how people might treat other people in a way they’re not supposed to,” she says. “This is someone that you’ve helped to make independent and to start believing in himself, and then that person dismisses everything that you’ve done for him, morally and emotionally and mentally — and you share kids with this person.”

The more heartbreaking scene, she says, actually comes later, when Ivana joins Trump in front of the cameras at a fancy event, smiling and waving. “How do you get the courage to leave that relationship? You’re thinking, ‘I can lose everything.’”

While Bakalova makes clear that she doesn’t agree with many of Ivana’s actions or beliefs, she does find her inspiring and impressive — and wishes she had demanded more in her prenuptial agreements. “I personally would love to [have met] her before she passed away, because I think she’s something special. I think it’s important to remind women of our generation that there have been women like her, even back in the ’70s, who dared to speak out, who dared to be ahead of their time.”

Like Ivana, Bakalova is an only child. Her mother, a nurse, and father, a chemist in a factory who also played guitar, raised her in the city of Burgas on the coast of the Black Sea. Nobody in her family worked in the arts.

As a kid, she sang in a folk music group that traveled around Europe and dreamed of playing guitar in a rock band, “like Led Zeppelin.” But after an injury to her vocal cords when she was 12, she pivoted to theater. What really fascinated her was how, in just an hour and a half, a play could both entertain people and provoke them to think. “From the beginning, I saw being an actor as a little bit of being an activist,” she says.

“I never believed that I have a chance to be here [in America] because people from my region of the world don’t get a chance to try that,” she says now, in total seriousness. “It’s usually a different scenario, like, if you submit yourself for an audition or something, you wind up kidnapped.”

The first place she set foot in America was Oklahoma for “Borat.” Her first trip to New York saw her fleeing Giuliani’s hotel room. Los Angeles, where she would go during breaks in filming, gave her a more gentle welcome. It also felt refreshing compared with Bulgaria, where she says many people still have trouble adjusting to life without communist censorship.

“I find it impressive and inspiring to see young people, people my age, that actually take a position and express their opinions and do something,” she says. “So I found myself actually liking it here.”

Now, she finds herself in a movie about the early days of the Republican presidential nominee in one of the most unpredictable elections in American history.

She can’t vote. And she says she is not trying to sway anyone’s political opinion. She just believes that art should take risks. “I think it’s interesting and important for us to look at people as human beings and judge them for their actions,” she says. “If somebody does something good, let’s root for them. If somebody does something that’s not going to bring us on another, better level, maybe we should think about, ‘Do we give that person power?’”