Following the long-awaited premiere of The Apprentice, Maria Bakalova talks about her role as Ivana Trump and how she nearly became fluent in Danish
Maria Bakalova has just had a shower. It is evening in Zürich, where she and her costars are at the film festival promoting The Apprentice, the much-buzzed about Donald Trump biopic, and she is just about to get glammed up for dinner. But on our Zoom call, for which the 28-year-old Bulgarian actor appears make-up free and relaxed, she recalls another premiere, at Cannes. For that occasion, she pulled off the ultimate glamour look, partly in honour of her character in the film, the late Ivana Trump.
Maria Bakalova at Cannes. Photo: Getty
“It made me feel like a princess,” Bakalova says of the Dolce & Gabbana premiere dress, a 2016 archival piece picked by her stylist Jessica Paster. “I love things that have some kind of magical touch and I always want something that is true to the characters that I play. Especially if it is a real person.” The ornate, emerald green Dolce Alta Moda gown featured an extraordinary hand-painted skirt. Plus, the dress was Italian, which Ivana Trump herself would have loved. “She had a very strong relationship with Italy,” says Bakalova about the Czech-born fashion icon, who died in 2022 at age 73. “And she was recognised for her dresses, her hair and her make up, and we wanted to do something that feels like her but a modern version of it.”
It was back in 2022 that Bakalova met with Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi in New York to discuss the role of Ivana. He had already cast Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer who mentored the future president of the US. Bakalova was a fan of the “very bold” director’s movies, particularly his last film, Holy Spider, which portrays the hunt for a serial killer in the holy city Mashad in Iran. So when she read The Apprentice, she was thrilled and not the least bit worried about the backlash that the movie could have because of its depiction of Trump.
“I am a strong believer that if you are nervous about something, it means you care,” she says. “If you care about something, it means you are passionate about it. If you are passionate, it means that it is something important and if it is important, it is your duty to do it.”
Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump in 'The Apprentice'. Photo: Pief Weyman
Photo: Pief Weyman
When The Apprentice premiered in Cannes, it was immediately threatened with law suits from the Trump campaign and subsequently held hostage by one of the film’s financiers, a Trump supporter. Thus, it had a hard time finding a distributor and a release date in the US. “I did not think it would be so hard to get the movie released,” says Bakalova. “He is famous for being the former president of the United States of America, but the story that we are following is not focused on him being a political figure. It is a story about a human being. It is a story about an archetype of a second son, who has never been trusted and never believed in and you do root for this person to become his own and prove himself. We are not doing a political propaganda movie. It is a very human story.”
I was a little scared of portraying someone real because as an actress, I wanted to do it with dignity and I knew that it might open up a conversation because these people are very famous.
Maria Bakalova
It isn’t the first time Bakalova proves her fearlessness by finding herself at the centre of a politically significant movie. In 2020, she appeared in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm as the titular character’s Kazakhstani daughter. In a gut-wrenching scene, Rudy Giuliani – Trump’s former personal lawyer – seems to start acting inappropriately towards her before Sacha Baron Cohen bursts into the room. Bakalova was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Oscar for her improvised performance. “Using comedy to provoke people and remind them that at the end of the day, it does not matter whether you are a politician, a waitress or an accountant, you should be judged by who you are as a person and whether you are nice and kind and supportive,” she says of the experience.
Maria Bakalova at the New York premiere of 'The Apprentice'. Photo: Alexandra Arnold
Photo: Alexandra Arnold
In The Apprentice, Bakalova also appears in one of the film’s most harrowing scenes, in which Trump rapes Ivana on their living room floor. The scene is based on a deposition Ivana gave under oath during the couple’s divorce. She later recanted her allegation. “I was a little scared of portraying someone real because as an actress, I wanted to do it with dignity and I knew that it might open up a conversation because these people are very famous,” says Bakalova. "But I stand by my words and I don’t think this is a political piece.”
It was Danish cinema that made Bakalova a true movie-lover in the first place, specifically films like Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt and Nikolaj Arcel’s A Royal Affair. In 2018, while she was a still a student, she even travelled to Denmark to visit Lars von Trier’s famed film company Zentropa. “I was told that I had to learn Danish fluently, if I wanted to work with them,” she says. “So I started learning Danish for only two months, because two months later, I ended up getting the role in Borat and a month later, I went to America.” So we nearly had the opportunity to claim Bakalova as a Scandinavian film star, but, with The Apprentice, she still enjoys the full-circle moment of working with a Danish director.