‘People are complex’: Maria Bakalova on Donald Trump - and playing Ivana in The Apprentice

The week Maria Bakalova was asked to consider playing Ivana Trump for the new film The Apprentice, she was in New York filming something else. With the meeting scheduled for her one day off, she spent the evening before trying to channel Donald Trump's first wife. The film is set in the 70s and 80s, so she spent hours wading through photos of Ivana in that era. "A lot of makeup, a lot of hair," she says. Bakalova laughs as she remembers spending the evening experimenting with a mushroom-like hairstyle and "heavy eyeliner with a lot of powder, like inches", although she didn't have an Ivana-esque wardrobe - "Am I gen Z or a millennial?" asks the 28-year-old. Either way, "We wear a lot of baggy clothes", so she chose her most skintight outfit.

She met the director Ali Abbasi in the middle of the day, feeling a little clownish in her Ivana cosplay. They spoke for a couple of hours, "about people growing up in post-communist countries - because [Ivana] was from Czechoslovakia, and I was born and raised in Bulgaria - which shapes your inner world, your thoughts. We talked a lot about the similarities of our stories."

Ivana had been a competitive skier, with a place on the national junior team that allowed her to compete outside communist Czechoslovakia in the late 60s. By the mid-90s, when Bakalova was born, Bulgaria was no longer a socialist republic but, for most people, travel outside the country was still rare. As a child, Bakalova, a competitive singer, got to travel to competitions all around Europe. It opened her eyes and instilled a sense of independence.

This is Bakalova's highest profile role since her big break in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Sacha Baron Cohen's 2020 mockumentary sequel about the Kazakhstani reporter Borat Sagdiyev. She played Borat's daughter, Tutar, in a performance so cringingly brilliant it got her an Oscar nomination. Despite this early success, Bakalova says her agents warned her not to get her hopes up about the role of Ivana - higher profile US actors were also in the running. "What I think is important is that [Abbasi] gave a chance to an eastern European to compete," she says. "To have the opportunity, rather than just playing a prostitute or a crazy Russian scientist or a mobster or somebody that is just in the background with a few lines."

It was six months before she found out that she'd got the role, followed by a tortuous journey to get the film made and released. In a Vanity Fair piece, the film's screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman, detailed the various obstacles - actors who didn't want to "humanise" Trump, Hollywood studios and streamers who wouldn't finance it, Trump's Muslim travel ban that made it difficult for Abbasi, who is Iranian and based in Denmark, to work in the US (as well as the actors' strikes and a global pandemic). The Apprentice's largest investor, a film-making son-in-law of a billionaire and prominent Trump donor, reportedly threatened to sink the film once he'd seen it, because of a scene in which the Trump character appears to rape his wife. Ivana alleged Trump raped her in her divorce deposition, but later retracted. Trump's lawyers sent the film-makers cease-and-desist letters and the big American distributors wouldn't touch it. "Hollywood fashions itself as a community of truth tellers," wrote Sherman, "but here they were running from a movie to prepare for a Trump presidency."

"We've been facing a bit of difficulty to release it," says Bakalova, with comic understatement.

In the film, Trump (played by a toupeed Sebastian Stan) is ambitious but slightly awkward and in the shadow of his father. He is then mentored and moulded by nefarious lawyer Roy Cohn (played, typically magnificently, by Succession's Jeremy Strong), whom Bakalova describes as "one of the most vicious people of our century".