Maria Bakalova On Playing Ivana Trump In The Apprentice

As the US heads to the polls, Maria Bakalova talks to Amel Mukhtar about her role as Trump’s first wife in the controversial film The Apprentice, and reflects on the influence Ivana had in shaping the man her husband would become.

Fashion Director: Nicole Smallwood. Photographer: Matthew Shave.

Interview: Maria Bakalova On Her Role As Ivana Trump In The Apprentice

Dress, Suzanne Neville; shoes, Manolo Blahnik; all jewellery, Kiki McDonough

‘I’m so happy to be seeing a woman,’ says Maria Bakalova once the Zoom loads, with a warm smile wide across her face. Playing Ivana Trump in The Apprentice, has she had to talk about this film to a lot of men? ‘Yeah,’ she deadpans. ‘It’s always a bit more satisfying to see a woman.’

You kind of feel the same way every time that Bakalova is on screen as Ivana, a bold and coiffed glamourpuss who becomes a welcome breath of (probably heavily perfumed) air in a film depicting the many sordid actions of greedy men. It is the Frankenstein story of the creation of the Donald Trump we know today – the man who would become the first former president in US history to be convicted of a felony – by the ruthless lawyer Roy Cohn, who is, in Bakalova’s view, ‘one of the most vicious people that has ever lived’. The film takes a slice of Trump’s life from the seventies to the nineties, the era in which he would meet and marry Ivana, his first wife and a different guiding force.

‘I was voluming my hair for probably two hours,’ says Bakalova, explaining how she got the part. While shooting another film in New York, her agents told her director Ali Abbasi was in town. With only one day off, she had to find a way to meet him and, if she pulled it off, had to make an impact. Her face fully powdered and kohl-lined, hair teased to the gods, she powered down New York for their midday meeting. ‘It’s tricky because you don’t know this person [and] you might seem kind of mental, but I want to give him an idea that I can look like her.’

Dress and earrings, Louis Vuitton

Ivana hugely helped to shape Trump, Bakalova found. ‘She started calling him “the Donald” first’

Twenty-eight-year-old Bakalova hadn’t known much beyond the surface level prior to the role. ‘I knew that Ivana was a beautiful model, a fashion queen. I knew that she’d been married to this person.But apart from that, I didn’t really know about her,’ she says. ‘I fell in love with her the moment I started reading. She’d been so outspoken and ahead of her time… Imagine that person back in the seventies growing up in a communist country, which is even more patriarchal and misogynistic in a lot of ways than the United States.’

Ivana hugely helped to shape Donald, Bakalova found. For example, ‘she started calling him “the Donald” first, because she didn’t know the language well… It’s still like “you are the man, the Donald”, boosting your confidence, making you believe. But that’s the tricky part, that when you give someone too much power, when you make them bigger than you… if you do it too much and neglect yourself, they will start taking advantage of you and dismiss you.’ 

Suit, Stella McCartney; earrings, Louis Vuitton; shoes, Malone Souliers

Deleted scenes expanded on Ivana’s fiery, independent nature, which Bakalova says helped inspire Trump’s own.

Deleted scenes expanded on Ivana’s fiery, independent nature, which Bakalova says helped inspire Trump’s own. ‘I wish we had them in the film – I hope they’re released in a different way.’ They include her first dinner with the Trumps, where, following his father, everyone orders steak. ‘I’ll have the halibut,’ recounts Bakalova as Ivana. ‘Never has anyone dared to do that before. It’s like “just order the fucking steak”. I’m not doing it. I have my own mind. I have my own decision, even if that’s going to piss off your family.’ 

In another, Ivana didn’t mention that she was a competitive skier and smashed Trump at it… She tells him how she grew up in a place she knew she had to escape if she was to become something. ‘She knew you had to be competitive in order to succeed,’ she says, with a soft smirk. ‘I do think Ivana was just as important as Roy Cohn in Donald’s development, but we would have had, like, a five-hour movie if we had everything.’ But doesn’t that mean the film ends up consolidating male power and obscuring the hidden role she strongly feels a woman played? She hesitates a little. ‘I agree,’ she says, quietly.

‘In countries like Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, the government depends on people to deliver medals in music or sports. My reality was music. Ivana’s was sport.’

Growing up in post-communist Bulgaria, as a child Bakalova wanted to be a Led Zeppelin-esque rock star, but due to the ‘patriarchy’ of her country, she was told to play something feminine instead. She chose the flute and sang competitively. ‘In countries like Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, the government depends on people to deliver medals and scholarships from competitions, whether music or sports. My reality was music. Ivana’s was sport.’ Although she started in pop and jazz, she switched to folk as there were more festivals, which meant she could travel further – to spend a month in Germany, Italy, France and Austria instead.

But after a vocal injury, as a very shy and quiet child, she tried acting. ‘What can I do in order to be somewhere else? Be somebody else? Have the opportunity to expand and put on a mask, and get rid of my shyness, my shame, all the fears and self-doubts?’ She used to draw the Hollywood sign on her school desk, but her teacher told her, ‘That’s never going to happen. You’re eastern European. You have an accent. You don’t speak English. They don’t cast people like you.’ But Maria Bakalova was born a miracle, to parents who couldn’t conceive for 15 years. She knew better than most that there is always a possibility that you beat the odds. When the high school she had just been accepted into cut its acting class, her mother sent all her medals and diplomas in a letter to the Minister of Culture. ‘We were nobodies with a big dream. My dad was always more realistic, even pessimistic. He was like, “Nobody’s going to open this.” But by the end of summer they got a letter back: find three other people and they could open the class. That changed my life.’

Dress, Elie Saab; diamond fringe necklace and earring, round diamond Promise ring, Graff

Strangely, her breakout debut part in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm in 2020, released just before another US presidential election, centred on Trump, and ended up depicting the shady dealings of his lawyer – at that time, Rudy Giuliani. The scene that probably got Bakalova her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination sees her character seeming to start pulling down Giuliani’s trousers. ‘I guess [Donald] just made some interesting choices about the lawyers around him,’ she says of the parallel. But she diplomatically avoids the subject of Giuliani, his defence of Trump’s infamous pussy-grabbing line, or that her scene with him became part of the evidence in a $10m sexual assault case against him. ‘I’m not familiar with that.’

‘The movie is bigger than just Donald Trump as a person. It’s about relationships, the influence of other people, the choices that you make.’

The film’s content – including a sexual assault scene – provoked Trump’s lawyers to send cease and desist letters to its makers in an attempt to stop its release. Bakalova felt its weight at the time. ‘I’m getting emotional now, because I do have family members that have been through this [assault], and it’s just something that we really need to talk about more and be more supportive of,’ she says. ‘It’s been challenging to go through this even as a character and as a scene in a movie. I don’t even want to imagine what it is like to go through it in real life.’ The real Ivana would go on to distance herself from the allegation that she made in a 1990 court deposition, ahead of Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2015. But, ‘for the time that we focus on in our movie, that’s her truth,’ says Maria.

With the film’s release just before the US presidential election, does she think it will help or hinder his chances against Kamala Harris? ‘I don’t see the movie being a political piece at all… The movie is bigger than just Donald Trump as a person. It’s about relationships, the influence of other people, the choices that you make. You can find yourself empathising with these characters, you can find yourself criticising them. As long as you feel something, that’s what makes art important.’ But anyway, in America, she says, ‘I don’t have the right to vote. I don’t think it’s my place to say you should do this or that. But I think it’s important to appreciate the fact that you have the right to vote. You have the right to express your opinion. And that’s what I’m hoping people will do.’

The Apprentice is in cinemas now.

Cover Shoot Credits

Photographer: Matthew Shave
Fashion Director: Nicole Smallwood
Make-up: Lan Nguyen-Grealis @ Eighteen Management using Ilia Beauty
Hair: Davide Barbieri @ Aframe agency
Nails: Christie Huseyin @ Eighteen Management
Fashion assistant: Lacie Gittins
Photographer’s assistants: Alicia Colarusso and Benji Meredith Hardy