Maria Bakalova on Doing Stunts in Dirty Angels, Taking Varied Roles

Since becoming a sensation after starring in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, fans have seen Maria Bakalova take on serious roles, such as in this year’s The Apprentice, and even voice an adorable psychic spacedog in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Now, Bakalova is taking on the world of action in Martin Campbell’s Dirty Angels. The action thriller is now playing in select theaters, on digital, and on demand.

“From Martin Campbell, director of Casino Royale, comes this tense action-thriller. When a group of schoolgirls is taken hostage in Afghanistan, an American soldier named Jake (Eva Green) joins an all-women commando unit to liberate them. The plan: Gain the trust of the terrorists by posing as members of a relief organization. But double-crosses, tragedies, and the ghosts of Jake’s past complicate the rescue in this do-or-die mission. With Maria Bakalova, Ruby Rose, and Jojo T. Gibbs,” says the synopsis.

Tyler Treese: Maria, what I’ve really loved about your career ever since you broke through with Borat 2 on the international scale is that you’ve really done a varied mix of projects. You’ve done some more great comedy, you’ve been great in some dramas. Now you’re doing action. Has this been a conscious decision to really show your range, or how do you pick your projects?

Maria Bakalova: Thank you so much. It’s been incredible to listen to you. I feel like I’m blushing, but I really, really am grateful to hear your words. It means a lot. I don’t know. I think I’ve been just drawn by the idea of working on good projects with talented people and stories that feel believable but entertaining and different. I’ve been thinking about this. All of us actors and all of us people, human beings are unique. At the end of the day, I feel like the goal is the same, to have longevity, to continue working, to continue surprising people, and I feel like the only way to do that is by leaving your comfort zone.

If something becomes too comfortable to do something new, to do something that provokes you, but also provokes the audience that you have because the people that support your work, the people that have seen your previous movie, will expect to see something probably similar to what they’ve seen. It’s somehow, at least in my head, interesting and satisfying to give them something they don’t really expect. If they’re your audience, if they’re your fans, if they’re your people that will go and buy a ticket and watch a movie, give them something that they don’t expect. Give them something that is gonna provoke them as well.

So, it’s been a conscious decision to do something that is not in the same shape or color or form like the previous one because I feel like there is a slippery line when you become too comfortable in one genre, in one specific [type], that you start repeating yourself in a lot of ways. So if you can mix them, if you can change a little bit, going from a comedy to a drama, to an action movie, to a superhero movie, to a horror movie, it’s, it’s somehow satisfying to do it.

I’ve been lucky to have a great team behind me that are open to have a discussion and to find the right next project. I’ve been lucky that I’ve met a lot of talented people, but also very kind human beings on different projects, which is always inspirational because when you see people that are exceptionally talented, like Martin Campbell, Eva [Green] is incredible actress, when you see people like Sacha [Baron Cohen] and the team behind Borat, when you see people like Halina Reijn, who now has a new movie called Babygirl, who did Bodies Bodies Bodies with us, and the great cast in this movie with Rachel Sennott, Chase Sui Wonders, Myha’la Herrold, and Amandla Stenberg, it’s inspirational to see talented people but also good human beings to spend time and to work with them and to develop.

I love that attitude, and it’s really served you well. I wanted to ask you about the action scenes because the last act of this movie gets wild. How was it being part of that choreography and doing that?

We did a lot of physical rehearsals. We did a lot of training. We had an incredible team of stunt performers, stunt artists, in the name of Alpha Stunt Team. It’s a Bulgarian, I’m proud to say it, stunt team lead by Kaloyan Vodenicharov and his incredible stunt artists. I had a great stunt double, Dessy Slavova, who, for the rest of my life, I hope will be my friend and my stunt double because she was exceptional. She told me a lot of things. I had a great trainer, who was like, “Okay, you’re gonna be working out every single day.” Then, on top of everything, we had a boot camp, which gave us the basic training of how all of these soldiers are learning stuff, learning how to survive, learning how to help other people survive, learning how to use weapons, learning how to do it safely.

I have to say that it’s really, really important to do it with the consciousness of you are dealing with prop guns, you’re dealing with prop weapons, but it’s still dangerous to do it if you’re not trained to do it. We had great people that gave us the training and we had the responsibility to do it right, because it’s an ensemble film. It’s not only you, you might hurt somebody by a mistake, by not thinking, by not training enough. We did that and we did a lot of choreography that made it feel, I believe, authentic, not staged.

Because in a lot of the scenes, it was like, how does, how does a real soldier stand and how does a soldier in a movie will stand and where is the line? How can you blur it so you can be still facing somehow the camera, you can still have the feeling of the characters in there? There’s a presence, not just a body there, but not to be, “Okay, I’m here, and I’m just pausing for the shot.” It’s been a beautiful mixture of doing it, and you are right, the last act, there is a lot of action. We’re saving the girls who are going there in full blood, and all of us go through a lot of crazy. It’s just a testimony to a lot of badass female soldiers, and thank God they exist in the world.

That training definitely paid off. One thing I liked about Dirty Angels, all of your group has cool call signs, but you have the coolest of them all. You’re “The Bomb. What did, what did you think of that name of being the bomb?

I loved it. I mean, similarly to my character, not that I’ve always wanted to be called “The Bomb,” but it’s cool. It’s like you wanna keep that as a nickname somehow. With her, she’s been an expert in everything that’s related to building bombs and dissolving bombs. She has a background in chemistry and also electronics, electricity, biology. She is this young girl, who very early on faced difficulties in life because her family used to have a fireworks shop and then she learned a little bit about explosives because of the environment she’s been around.

But while she’s 11, her family goes through some difficulties in life and become addicted to drugs. So she decides that she’s gonna save them by destroying the meth lab, by creating a bomb, but finding the right time when there is not a human being around it. So everybody can be saved. … That’s the beginning of that career of being called “The Bomb,” just learning a lot about explosives and learning how to do it safely, learning how to do it by natural ingredients. So, it fits her. I wore that name proudly, and I loved it. I really, really loved it.

You mentioned being proud that the stunt team was Bulgarian here, and you also produced and starred in Triumph, which was selected as Bulgaria’s entry for the Best International Feature Film. What did that mean for you to get that recognition from your country?

It means a lot. … It’s really, really important because it’s a movie that is taking place back in the nineties, right after the fall of the communist regime in an era when the country is so fragile and it doesn’t really know which direction to take towards democracy or to choose another communistic party, even though they’re not under the dictatorship of communism. It’s a story inspired by real event that happened in the nineties where our government funded a mission to dig a hole underground in search of alien intelligence. All of that has been just through the guidance of a psychic. This story really happened in my country and we decided to create a movie about it because it feels timely and it feels universal. People of power sometimes make crazy decisions that influence the world and they waste a lot of money and a lot of resources and make people lose their minds in a lot of ways.

This is the story behind Triumph. For me, it means a lot to continue doing movies in my region of the world, in my country, because I believe in the art of Bulgaria. I believe in the artists in Bulgaria, and I do believe we should be given more chances. If there is a possibility for me to shine a light on people from there, to give a chance for people working and living and creating art to be seen by the world, I will always wanna do that.

My first favorite actor who was like, “Okay, I want to be like him.” This idea of falling in love with the performance of an actor was Mads Mikkelsen in The Hunt back in 2012. His career has been exceptional. He’s been one of these actors that made it in America. He’s been doing a lot of Hollywood movies, but he’s always there for Denmark. He continues doing a lot of Danish movies. I personally want to do that as well. I want to be able to go back home and to continue working with incredibly talented people, bring a lot of people to Bulgaria, bring a lot of Bulgaria to the world, and just rebuild that connection between the East and the West, because that’s the only way we can evolve and learn from each other.

Thanks to Maria Bakalova for taking the time to talk about Dirty Angels.