She landed the part and filmed her brief scene as the wife in a flashback as a young TV actress.īakalova wants people to watch The Father, she says, “Because it tackles a global problem the problem of communication in the age of mobile devices that have become handy during the Covid quarantine, but that have also destroyed our ability to have a real conversation.” (You can watch a trailer at the bottom of the story featuring Bakalova at the very end.) So, when one of the directors called her in her third year at the Academy to invite her to audition for a very small part in their new movie The Father, about a grieving patriarch reconnecting with his son after the sudden death of his wife, Bakalova was ecstatic. For more from Bakalova’s personal collection of photos, see our gallery below. Maria Bakalova sits on a breakwater by the Black Sea in her hometown of Burgas, Bulgaria, circa 2014-15. She even traveled with them to the set of a film the pair were directing and rendered PA services for free just so she could watch and learn. They taught the only film acting class at the Academy, and Bakalova loved it so much she volunteered to help Grozeva and Valchanov with scheduling and other tasks so that she could attend each week, not only when it was her turn to perform. A lot of what she did learn about movie acting, and which helped her give the performance in Borat, she owes to The Father’s directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov, two of the top Bulgarian filmmakers of the past decade. While the big screen had always been Bakalova’s goal, acting training in Bulgaria is traditionally geared heavily towards theater. Maria Bakalova On Historic Golden Globe Nomination For ‘Borat’ & What’s Next She shifted focus to European cinema, where a successful career seemed more attainable, studied the works of top filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, Emir Kusturica and Andrey Zvyagintsev and became a big fan of Danish films. There haven’t been any big Hollywood stars from Eastern Europe.” She tore the pages with her Hollywood plans out of her notebook and erased the drawings from her desk. “I told myself, these are just childhood dreams. “I started dreaming that I was arriving in Los Angeles, rolling my suitcase down those iconic palm tree-lined streets, with the Hollywood sign in the background, and I was telling myself, ‘I’m going to be a great movie star someday,’ ” recalls Bakalova, quoting Marilyn Monroe.īut as she entered her late teens, reality set in. By the time she was around 12 or 13, that was no longer enough, and she expanded into acting.Īt the performing arts high school in her hometown, where she was a straight-A student majoring in acting and minoring in flute, she started doodling the Hollywood sign on her desk, and jotted down thoughts about moving to L.A. Growing up in the town of Burgas on the Black Sea, Bakalova’s first love was music, and she took singing and flute lessons. Just weeks later, she would self-tape an audition for a mystery casting call that would change her life. That was the theme of Maria Bakalova’s monologue in her 2019 graduate performance showcase at the Bulgarian National Academy for Theater and Film Arts. In a Zoom chat conducted in their native tongue, Bakalova (whose last name is pronounced bah-KAH-loh-vah) shares her Cinderella story with fellow Bulgarian expat, Deadline’s Co-Editor-in-Chief, Nellie Andreeva, as well as the best, hardest and scariest moments from her work on Borat. Sacha Baron Cohen On Maria Bakalova's Brave Turn In 'Borat Subsequent Moviefilm' - Contenders Film
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