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

‘The Apprentice’ star Maria Bakalova didn’t stay in character as Ivana Trump off the set: ‘That could have affected my mental health’.

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. 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. Bakalova’s two most notable scenes are when Ivana takes on Donald and Roy in a battle over a prenup, forcing the two bullies to back down, and later when Trump, who is shedding his humanity, turns a marital argument into a brutal rape.

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