Maria Bakalova surpassed Leonardo DiCaprio and Bruce Willis in popularity

For the first time a Bulgarian actress is №1 in the star rating of the IMDb platform

Bulgarian Maria Bakalova became the most popular actress in the ranking of the authorized film platform IMDb, leaving behind celebrities such as Adam Sandler, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio and Bruce Willis.

The actress attracted attention with her participation in the movie “Borat 2”, where she played the 15-year-old daughter of Sasha Baron Cohen Tutar. The film was soon released on Amazon, but even before its release, the name of Bakalova was on the lips of millions of people. The reason is her scene with Donald Trump’s lawyer and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Bakalova met him in a hotel room on the pretext that he was a journalist and wanted to ask him some questions for an interview. He removed the mike from his lapel, touched her waist, lay down on the bed, and put his hands in his pants. Cohen chimed in, appearing dressed in his underwear, saying, “She’s 15. She’s too old for you. Take me instead.”

Giuliani denies that he had indecent wishes for the girl. He claims he leaned back to put the shirt on his pants.

“He said he hadn’t done anything indecent. My feeling is that if this is normal for him, God knows what he was going to do with all the women in the hotel, a glass of whiskey in hand,” Cohen told him in an interview. with The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

To secretly film the scene, they made something like a stash in the closet where the actor would be. Before the interview, Giuliani entered the hotel room with a police officer who searched the room but found nothing.

Cohen did not directly see what was happening from his hiding place. He was carrying a phone where he was going to receive a message from the director about when to enter the frame.

There was only one problem: the mobile battery was only 3% charged. The actor did not panic, he turned on the device in airplane mode to save energy.

So they shot the scene that Cohen defines as key to the production. It was the scandal surrounding the main protagonist, Maria Bakalova, that made the actress so popular that she would surpass Anne Hathaway and Tom Cruise in a few days in the IMDb ranking, which is determined by millions of platform users across the world.

Bakalova doesn’t get her role easily. “I didn’t want to start shooting the movie until we found Borat’s perfect daughter. She has to be amazing at improvisations, be able to stay in her image for many hours, play emotionally and be fun,” says Cohen. 5,000 actresses participated. in the casting for the role of Tutar.

“We finally found this girl who had just graduated from theater and was 22 years old. She was great and that’s why we brought her to England. In the second stage, she had to convince people that the image she was recreating was real. It was Borat and she was my daughter. We spent 2 hours locked up with people who didn’t know we were actors. But she just … If she doesn’t win an Oscar, I don’t know what the Academy is doing, “Cohen said of Bakalova’s talent.