Maria Bakalova, the Borat discovery Hollywood keeps casting from behind the Iron Curtain

Maria Bakalova

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 4, 1996 Burgas, Bulgaria
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, Mayday
Awards	Critics' Choice · Askeer (honorary)

For the first weeks of her international career, almost nobody knew Maria Bakalova’s name. The makers of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm credited her under a pseudonym, and the film depended on that cover: the people Sacha Baron Cohen‘s crew filmed had to believe that Tutar, the teenage daughter of a Kazakh television reporter, was real. The disguise held long enough to produce an Academy Award nomination. What she has done with the visibility since is the better story, because Hollywood’s offers keep circling one type, the daughter or wife from the far side of the old Iron Curtain, and her latest, in the Apple TV comedy Mayday, is the daughter of a former KGB agent.

Bakalova grew up in Burgas, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, the daughter of a nurse and a chemist. She took singing lessons and played the flute from the age of six, sang in a choir that toured Europe, and at twelve entered the National School of Music and Stage Arts in her hometown, majoring in drama. By her own account she was a disciplined, bookish teenager who was reading Dostoyevsky at fifteen and escaping into García Márquez, Borges and Bulgakov. Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt is the film she credits with turning her toward screen acting.

At the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia she worked through stage roles in Les Liaisons dangereuses and Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and a classmate signed her up for the blind audition that gave her a first lead, the teenager Yana in Transgression, which earned her a best actress prize at Toronto’s Alternative Film Festival. Her fixation on Danish cinema went further than most student enthusiasms. She spent part of her scholarship taking her parents to Denmark, walked into the offices of Zentropa and asked to work as a runner on Lars von Trier’s next film; she was turned away because she did not speak Danish, and started learning it. Closer to home she volunteered to help Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov, who taught the academy’s only film acting class, and they gave her a brief flashback role in The Father, the drama that won the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary. In Last Call she played a suicidal young woman. She was still in her early twenties, having been born on 4 June 1996, when she moved to Los Angeles in 2019.

The Borat sequel arrived in October 2020 under conditions that suited an unknown. During the secret casting she flew to London for a callback and worried, she later said, that she might be walking into a trafficking scheme. The film came out weeks before the American presidential election, and coverage fixed on a hotel-room scene in which her character interviews Rudy Giuliani. The reviews fixed on her. Matt Fowler of IGN called her every bit Baron Cohen’s on-screen equal. She won the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for best supporting actress and was nominated for the Oscar, the BAFTA and the Screen Actors Guild award in the same category, plus a Golden Globe nomination for best actress in a comedy, the first Bulgarian actress nominated for any of them.

The years that followed tested range more than fame. In Women Do Cry, selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes, she played Sonja, a nineteen-year-old in denial about an HIV diagnosis. She joined Amandla Stenberg and Pete Davidson in the A24 horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, took an ensemble part in Judd Apatow’s The Bubble and earned her first producing credit on the romantic comedy The Honeymoon. Her biggest audience came without her face: she voiced and performed the motion capture for Cosmo the Spacedog in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which took $845.6 million worldwide.

The pattern in her American casting is hard to miss once it is listed. After Tutar came Rada Adzhubey, Nikita Khrushchev’s daughter, in Jerry Seinfeld‘s Unfrosted; then Ivana Trump, the Czechoslovak skier turned Manhattan businesswoman, in Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, which competed for the Palme d’Or; now Anna Ustinov in Mayday. Her accent has become a casting shorthand, and the roles that ignore it have not always used her well. Several critics felt Bodies Bodies Bodies wasted her comic timing on a straight part, and Ben Kenigsberg of The New York Times wrote that The Bubble underused her. The Apprentice showed what happens when the type is given room: Screen Daily found her sharp as a woman who outgrows the naive newcomer she starts as, and at Cannes she called Ivana the moral center of the story.

Her answer has been to build the parts she is not offered. With the actor Julian Kostov she co-founded Five Oceans, a production company meant to carry Bulgarian, Balkan and Slavic stories to international audiences, and she went back to Grozeva and Valchanov to star in and produce Triumph, a black comedy that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2024 and became Bulgaria’s submission for the international feature Oscar. Burgas made her an honorary citizen in 2021, and at the Critics’ Choice Awards she used the stage to call for a new era of cultural exchange between Eastern Europe and Hollywood.

Since the summer of 2025 the releases have come quickly. She voiced Pigtail Petrova in The Bad Guys 2. O Horizon, Madeleine Sackler’s science-fiction comedy-drama about a neuroscientist trying to reach her late father, played by David Strathairn, reached American theaters in June 2026. In July Learning to Breathe Under Water, Rebekah Fortune’s family drama with Rory Kinnear, premiered at Karlovy Vary with Bakalova as a free-spirited au pair; in August the first-date comedy All Night Wrong, opposite Zach Cherry, opened in the United States and Canada. Mayday, written and directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, followed on Apple TV on 4 September 2026, with Ryan Reynolds as a stranded Navy pilot and Kenneth Branagh as the ex-KGB agent whose daughter she plays.

Next comes a voice role in Margie Claus, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation’s Christmas comedy with Melissa McCarthy and Andrew Scott, set for November 2027, and the thriller No Way Off, directed by Brian Kelly with Peter Mullan, now in post-production, in which she plays a young mother trapped on a bus by its driver. Its logline does not say where she is from.