Maria Bakalova – A Very Serious Woman

Maria Bakalova never dreamed of doing comedy. But upstaging Borat has a way of changing your life.

- By Hunter Harris

MARIA BAKALOVA IS NOT CONCERNED about getting hurt. There's even a kind of twisted pleasure, she says, in knowing you can endure it. Grinning into her computer camera, the 26-year-old shows me her bruises, remnants of a movie she just shot in her home country of Bulgaria: bluish-green welts covering both elbows, a few scratches still red and inflamed on the back of her hand. She is more concerned about hurting someone else, as when she was shooting the A24 horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies. In one scene from the film, which is out this week, a group of longtime friends and their new partners sit cross-legged on the floor to enact an icebreaking, boundary-crossing ritual: One by one, they turn to their right and slap the shit out of their neighbor-who then turns to their right and slaps the shit out of the next person.

"I was so freaking conscious when I hit somebody because I don't really know my strength," says Bakalova, who plays newcomer Bee. She tried to get away with the lightest possible love tap, but the script required her to make contact. "And I think one of the times my hand was just too heavy, honestly." Smack! went her palm across Pete Davidson's face.