How Did ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’ Find The Amazing Maria Bakalova To Play Borat’s Daughter?
By Ethan Anderton/Dec. 17, 2020 3:30 pm EST
Obviously there was an audition process, but how do you test actresses in their ability to not only be funny but pull of what Cohen does by playing a character in front of real people? It requires razor sharp wit, impeccable improvisational skills, but also an ability to appear as if you’re not acting. That was one of the biggest challenges in finding the right actress to play Tutar.
There was global search with casting directors looking all over the world for the right actress, and part of the process was doing test scenes with Cohen that resembled what would appear in the movie, complete with real people for them to interact with. Woliner recalled:
After digging through hundreds of audition videos from across the globe, Woliner was most impressed by Maria Bakalova. He described what was in her audition tape:
“We did so much shooting that will never see the light of day where we’re just trying things out. And a lot of that was a few different actresses for this role, and all of them incredible, all talented, but some were so funny that then we would be with a real person for five minutes and they’d say, ‘You’re an actor. This can’t be real. This is a joke.’ And all it is is saying one wrong thing that feels like a pre-written joke. People are not stupid. People are like, ‘Okay, what is this?’ It became so clear that we needed someone who was not only funny, who could pull off the emotional scenes with Sacha, and fearless, who can sit in a room with someone like Rudy Giuliani and get through that, but also someone who is never going to be, as we would call it, busted.”
From there, both Sacha Baron Cohen and Maria Bakalova flew to England (since getting into the United States was more complicated), and they shot test footage in disguise with an older English couple as their guinea pigs. Woliner explained, “A lot of it was similar material to what made it in the movie of long scenes of interacting with people and being in a house for the first time and causing trouble and making mischief.”
“Turned out she had just had her graduation from an acting academy she was going to, and it was the middle of the night after the graduation, and she’s in this attic, and she was just hilarious and real and doing some material that we’d sent her. It was a speech about how her daddy’s the best daddy in the village and her cage is nicer than the other girls’. She just had so much cockiness and bravado about how nice her cage was that it was really hilarious. And she also felt so real.”
