‘The Apprentice’ Star Maria Bakalova Didn’t Stay in Character as Ivana Trump Off the Set: ‘That Could Have Affected My Mental Health’

variety.com:

Stuart Miller The Iron Curtain had already collapsed when Maria Bakalova was growing up in Bulgaria, but old sensibilities still lingered: as a girl she was discouraged from playing the “aggressive and muscular” electric guitar (she learned the flute instead) and life there was still largely circumscribed by national borders.

But Bakalova, who portrays the Czech-born Ivana Trump in “The Apprentice,” found avenues for expansion, in part, as a way of rebelling. “It didn’t feel right to be put in a box because of your gender,” says Bakalova, who burst on the scene with her Oscar-nominated performance in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.” “Knowing I didn’t get a chance to pursue something had some impact on my development and maybe made me stronger and a bit more daring.” Bakalova’s first path out was singing, and by age 11, she was traveling throughout Western Europe to competitions, much as Ivana Trump had gotten out via national ski teams. “In countries like ours, music and sports were the only options for traveling,” Bakalova says. “Seeing the world opened my eyes.” After injuring her vocal cords at 11, she turned to literature for escape, though she was not devouring YA fantasies. “I started with what we had at home,” she says, referring to Chekov, Pushkin and her favorite, Dostoevsky. “He became my first love in literature.

Then came Gabriel Garcia Márquez, where the magical realism gave me this weird feeling of escapism.” She loved “The Portrait of Dorian Gray” as a tween before moving on to Jorge Luis Borges and Nabokov. “The novels made me dream I can even go places that don’t actually exist,” she says.