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    Stevie Nicks says Fleetwood Mac would have been ‘done’ without 1977 abortion

    Stevie Nicks thrust herself into the ongoing fight for access to abortion in the US because she had “been there, done that”, the legendary singer-songwriter says in a new interview.“I tell a good story,” Nicks remarked in an interview conducted by CBS News Sunday Morning, a clip of which was circulated by the network in advance.“So maybe I should try to do something.“I was also there.”Nicks’ comments come after the release in September of her new single The Lighthouse, which was inspired by progressives’ battle to reinstate federal abortion rights in the US.She wrote the rock song after three US supreme court justices appointed by the Donald Trump White House voted to essentially overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that gave Americans a constitutional right to an abortion.In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Nicks discussed her certainty that if she had not gotten an abortion in the 1970s, it would have marked the end of the renowned band Fleetwood Mac that she ultimately helped launch to rock immortality.Nicks at the time had a contraceptive intrauterine device but nonetheless became pregnant with singer Don Henley after breaking up her prior relationship with Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsey Buckingham, she told Rolling Stone. She said she decided to terminate the pregnancy in about 1977, or going into 1978, as Fleetwood Mac sat atop the world after its album Rumours.Rumours won Fleetwood Mac the Grammy for album of the year in 1978, a year that saw the band play 18 live shows in 11 US states. Three of the album’s singles – Go Your Own Way, Don’t Stop and You Make Loving Fun – reached the top 10 on the charts. Dreams, with Nicks’ vocals, went No 1 as Rumours eventually finished seventh on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.“Now what the hell am I going to do?” Nicks said to Rolling Stone about her thought process at the time of her aborted pregnancy. “I cannot have a child. I am not the kind of woman who would hand my baby over to a nanny, not in a million years.“So we would be dragging a baby around the world on tour, and I wouldn’t do that to my baby. I wouldn’t say I just need nine months. I would say I need a couple of years, and that would break up the band period.”Nicks said she doesn’t “really care” if people become upset with her over having decided to get an abortion. “My life was my life, and my plan was my plan and had been since I was in the fourth grade,” Nicks said to Rolling Stone, adding that Fleetwood Mac would have been “done” if she had decided otherwise.Nicks’ remarks to Rolling Stone about her personal experience with abortion elaborate on ones she delivered to the Guardian in 2020, when she said: “There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly.”Meanwhile, after the reversal of Roe v Wade as Trump set his sights on a second presidency in the 5 November election, Nicks said she heard everywhere around her that “somebody has to do … [and] say something” to support abortion rights.“And I’m like: ‘Well I have a platform,’” Nicks said after CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Tracy Smith asked the singer about the courage needed to “step into the waters of the abortion debate”.The result was The Lighthouse, a rare new release for Nicks, whose last album of entirely fresh material was put out in 2011. The single casts her as a lighthouse guiding women to campaign for their rights as voters choose between Kamala Harris and Trump, whose supporters include a conservative thinktank that is urging him to step up attacks against sexual and reproductive health and rights.“They’ll take your soul, take your power, unless you stand up, take it back,” Nicks sings on the track. “Try to see the future and get mad/It’s slipping through your fingers, you don’t have what you had/And you don’t have much time to get it back.” More

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    Seth Meyers on ex-president’s alleged admiration of Nazi generals: ‘Trump is a fascist’

    Late-night hosts talk the former White House chief of staff John Kelly calling Donald Trump a fascist and Tucker Carlson’s bizarre rant about spanking on the campaign trail.Seth MeyersSeth Meyers devoted his Thursday Closer Look segment to the bombshell political story of the week: a New York Times interview with John Kelly, in which the former White House chief of staff said Donald Trump expressed admiration for Hitler and his generals. “I’m not sure we as a society have fully absorbed the magnitude of this story, given the way the media has been covering it,” the Late Night host said before a clip of CNN following up the story with a report on Eminem campaigning for Kamala Harris.“You can’t follow up a story as insane as ‘presidential candidate praises Hitler’ with fun wordplay about Eminem,” said Meyers. “If the first story is the next president could be a Hitler-lover, then just don’t have a second story. That’s enough to fill an hour.”“I get it can be tough to figure out how to cover something like this, because like all Trump revelations it’s both shocking and not at all surprising,” he added. “So we’re left in this weird middle ground where you’re reporting something that everyone basically knows already, but it’s also still insane. It’s like going through a haunted house with a group of friends that used to work there.”Naturally, Republicans are scrambling to normalize the situation. Meyers played a clip of the New Hampshire governor, Chris Sununu, who said on CNN: “Look, we’ve heard a lot of extreme things about Donald Trump from Donald Trump. It’s kinda par for the course. It’s really, unfortunately, with a guy like that, it’s really baked into the vote.”“His love of Adolf Hitler is baked in?” Meyers marveled. “That’s like saying, ‘Look, that dead rat is baked into this loaf of sourdough. What are you going to do, go all the way back to the bakery?’ If it’s baked in, then don’t eat the thing it’s baked into!“This is not a complicated story,” he concluded. “Trump is a fascist who likes other fascists and wants to emulate fascism. If you’re shrugging that off as baked in, then you’re just saying that you’re OK with fascism. If you’re still supporting Trump, just admit that you think fascism is cool.”Stephen ColbertOn the Late Show, Stephen Colbert noted that Trump will hold a rally at Madison Square Garden this weekend. “Just what New Yorkers need – more garbage around Penn Station,” he joked.The rally is “confusing”, as “New York is not what you call a swing state,” he said. Trump trails Kamala Harris by 19 points in the state – “or as the New York Jets say, not bad!” Colbert quipped.Given the interview with Kelly this week, in 10 days, “we all get to find out whether we live in a fascist country”, said Colbert. “I’m not saying that’s a good feeling, but definitely the feeling. And if you’re feeling the same way, you’re not alone.”Colbert played a clip from CNN’s presidential town hall in which Anderson Cooper asked Harris whether she thought Trump was a fascist; she replied: “Yes, I do.”Meanwhile, Trump was joined on the campaign trail by the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who made his case for the former president with a bizarre rant about spanking. “Dad comes home. He’s pissed. Dad is pissed. And when dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now,’” he told the crowd.“I just can’t figure out why they’re having trouble appealing to female voters,” Colbert deadpanned. “Not to fact-check you there, Tuck, but we know from Stormy Daniels that Daddy is the one who likes to get spanked.”Overall, “that was an upsetting little monologue,” Colbert concluded. “Angry Daddies punishing little girls? I’m guessing when Tucker wrote that, he was vigorously spanking something.”The Daily ShowAnd on The Daily Show, the guest host Michael Kosta also mocked Carlson’s bizarre spanking speech. Carlson began his speech with a cackle, delighting in what he said was his first appearance at a political rally. “I don’t want to be a hater – he’s excited for his first political rally. Seems like a perfectly reasonable time to laugh like an old-timey villain who tied a woman to the railroad tracks,” Kosta joked.And then he played one of Carlson’s most offending lines: “You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now.”“This might be why you’ve never been invited to speak at a political rally before,” said Kosta. “You see, America, these Trump people, they aren’t weird. They just know that Trump is a big, strong daddy that’s coming home to spank us all. Totally normal stuff! I can’t wait to hear Tucker’s thoughts on the economy – ‘Inflation is like a babysitter, and she’s been naughty.’” More

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    Beyoncé to appear with Kamala Harris in Houston to highlight abortion rights – reports

    Beyoncé will appear with Kamala Harris in Houston on Friday, according to media reports.The star turn will confirm that, following Harris’s endorsement by Taylor Swift last month, the Democratic vice-president and US presidential candidate has the support of the two most popular musicians in the world – a potentially invaluable asset for galvanising young voters.Harris is rallying in Texas, a Republican stronghold, to highlight abortion rights and support Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred, who trails Republican Ted Cruz in opinion polls.Beyoncé, 43, will appear in her home city along with her mother, Tina Knowles, and 91-year-old country music giant Willie Nelson, according to sources cited by the Washington Post newspaper.The event presents an opportunity for Beyoncé to give a live performance of Freedom, a song from her 2016 album Lemonade, which the vice-president has been using as walk-on music at rallies while making freedom a central theme of her campaign.Beyoncé, who has hundreds of millions of followers on social media, sang a cover of Etta James’s At Last at one of President Barack Obama’s inaugural balls in 2009, before singing the national anthem at Obama’s second inauguration ceremony in 2013.She performed Formation at a rally for Democrat Hillary Clinton three days before the presidential election in 2016 and told the crowd: “I want my daughter to grow up seeing a woman leading the country. That’s why I’m with her.”Her backing of Harris is therefore no surprise and fed fevered speculation – and inaccurate reporting – that she would make a dramatic entrance at this summer’s Democratic national convention in Philadelphia.Beyoncé becomes the latest celebrity to bring star power to the Harris campaign. On Thursday, the Democrat is holding a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, with musician Bruce Springsteen, film director Spike Lee, actor Samuel L Jackson and actor and filmmaker Tyler Perry as well as Obama.Other musicians supporting the Democrat include Eminem, Cher, Billie Eilish, Barbra Streisand, Carole King, John Legend and Stevie Wonder. Trump has the backing of Jason Aldean, Lee Greenwood, Kanye West and Kid Rock, while the Republican national convention was shown a video featuring rapper Forgiato Blow and reality TV star Amber Rose. More

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    Boris Johnson’s memoir flops as sales slump despite ‘£2m advance’

    Your support helps us to tell the storyThis election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.CloseRead moreSales of Boris Johnson’s political memoir are understood to have slumped well below expectations, with the much-advertised release now on track to be overtaken by a cookbook.Despite an apparent £2m advance on the 784-page account of his time in Downing Street, Unleashed only managed to sell 42,528 copies in its opening week, far fewer than his publishers, HarperCollins, had likely predicted.The former prime minister suffered a 62 per cent reduction in his sales lead this week, narrowly managing to cling onto the number one spot, selling just 133 more copies than Tim Spector’s The Food for Life Cookbook.Mr Johnson’s sales figures fall far short of predecessors Margaret Thatcher, who sold an estimated 120,000 copies upon the release of her 1993 memoir, and Tony Blair, who sold 92,000 copies in the first week of his.Despite the barrage of press attention, the book’s lacklustre reception has reportedly left shops with “piles and piles” of copies, and sales figures are likely to continue to plummet.Despite a sizeable £2m advance on the 784-page account of events, Johnson only managed to sell 42,528 stories in its opening week, far less than his publishers HarperCollins predicted he would sell More

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    ‘There’s vomit on my sweater already!’ Barack Obama raps Eminem’s Lose Yourself at Detroit rally

    Barack Obama rapped Eminem’s signature hit Lose Yourself to a crowd in Detroit during a campaign rally for Kamala Harris.He was preceded by Eminem himself, who told the crowd in his home city: “It’s important to use your voice, I’m encouraging everyone to get out and vote, please … I don’t think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution of what people will do if you make your opinion known. I think vice-president Harris supports a future for this country where these freedoms and many others will be protected and upheld.”Obama opened his ensuing speech by saying: “I gotta say, I have done a lot of rallies, so I don’t usually get nervous, but I was feeling some kind of way following Eminem,” before segueing into Lose Yourself’s opening lines: “I notice my palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, vomit on my sweater already, mom’s spaghetti, I’m nervous but on the surface I look calm and ready to drop bombs but I keep on forgetting …”He joked that he thought Eminem would be performing and he would be a guest star, adding: “Love me some Eminem.”The former president is an avowed music fan, sharing his favourite songs twice a year in official posts on his social media. Summer 2024’s selections included songs by contemporary pop names such as Beyoncé, Tyla and Rema alongside older tracks by Nick Drake, the Supremes and cosmic jazz musician Pharoah Sanders.Obama went on to excoriate Donald Trump in his speech, recalling how Trump expressed doubt about the election results in 2020. “Because Donald Trump was willing to spread lies about voter fraud in Michigan, protesters came down, banged on the windows, shouting, ‘Let us in. Stop the count.’ Poll workers inside being intimidated … all because Donald Trump couldn’t accept losing … there is absolutely no evidence that this man thinks about anybody but himself.”He questioned Trump’s mental fitness for the role of president, saying: “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this. But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”He also made reference to Trump’s stunt earlier this week, where he worked in a McDonald’s kitchen and drive-thru counter that was closed to the public. Harris, he said, “worked at McDonald’s when in college to pay her expenses. She did not pretend to work at McDonald’s when it was closed.”Tim Walz, also speaking at the rally, decried the stunt as “cosplaying … Fake orders for fake customers”. He also appealed to freedom of speech, saying Trump was “talking about sending the military against people who don’t support him. He’s naming names.” More

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    Call Her Daddy to Theo Von: how podcasts became a vital election tool

    For much of this strange and unprecedented presidential campaign cycle, candidates have been making news for the press they aren’t doing, rather than what they say when they actually give interviews. Kamala Harris was criticized for a lack of real sit-downs following her sudden ascent to the nomination over the summer. Donald Trump, meanwhile, keeps pulling out of major-press interviews, including one with NBC News, as well as a 60 Minutes segment. (Harris did appear on the TV newsmagazine institution as scheduled.) But both candidates have firmed up their dedication to traveling into less traditional media territory: podcasts. Between the two of them, this may be the most podcast-favoring presidential campaign ever conducted.It might seem like an odd strategy. Even for hardcore podcast enthusiasts, it might feel like a medium that peaked in excitement a couple of election cycles ago, now lingering somewhere above Pokémon Go but below TikTok and Netflix. Format-wise, talk-based podcasts still hew closely to old-fashioned radio and – with video components now popular – talk shows, which don’t exactly feel like the most forward-thinking reference points. And though they can produce plenty of sound bites, podcasts aren’t exactly concise, either. Isn’t doing a big entertainment podcast akin to sitting for a lightweight Jimmy Fallon interview but at marathon length and, depending on the host, featuring even more self-satisfied cackling?Even if it is, though, it’s also considered a major avenue of access to certain broad audiences that might include undecided or undermotivated voters. Harris has initially gone both broader and more selective. Her biggest move was sitting for a 40-minute interview on Call Her Daddy, a relationships and advice podcast that’s a staple of the top five on Spotify’s charts. In other words, it’s the kind of broad-based show that sees itself as a relatively big-tent affair with a politically diverse audience. Host Alexandra Cooper began her episode practically apologizing for talking to a politician – the sitting vice-president of the United States! – because she generally tries to avoid politics.The first chunk of the interview did, indeed, largely avoid talking politics per se, given the show’s focus on mental and physical wellbeing, allowing Harris to get both personal and (in terms of her candidacy) pretty vague. But Harris did have the opportunity to talk about the major issue of abortion rights in the wake of Roe v Wade’s 2022 overturn, something Cooper obviously feels strongly about. And though the Call Her Daddy audience is too big to be completely homogenous, having Harris talk about this stuff with Cooper did feel like a tacit pitch to younger white women: here’s why this issue and this candidate should matter to you.View image in fullscreenIn that demographic sense, Call Her Daddy felt like an outlier in this recent season of podcast interviews. Harris’s other major podcast appearance so far was a longer (if often more personally focused) interview with All The Smoke, hosted by former basketball players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. So maybe the correct analogy isn’t the diminished influence of late-night talk shows or general-interest radio after all, but the unstoppable, evergreen blather of sports talk radio. Even Call Her Daddy, which has nothing in particular to do with sports, was owned by Barstool Sports for several years before it went to Spotify.Trump also went on a Barstool-affiliated show, Bussin’ With The Boys, hosted by former NFL players. His podcast playbook seems to be more focused on energizing the younger end of his base, the strange intersection of sports fans and comedy bros, where attaining some mixture of being perceived as kinda athletic or vaguely funny trumps, so to speak, all other concerns. Like Call Her Daddy, these shows also affect a kind of independent-thinking, quasi-apolitical posture – while also flattering their audience with the practiced pandering of a classic politician. In other words, it’s Trump country for people who don’t think of themselves as Trump country. So Trump gets to yuk it up with cult-of-personality comedians like Andrew Schulz or Theo Von, giving off the impression that, if you don’t pay too much attention, he’s a fun anti-woke bro who talks common sense. Even the occasional pushback he receives doesn’t actually question his basic worldview. When he misidentified the Olympic boxer Imane Khelif twice (as transgender, which she’s not; and as a man, which she’s not) on Bussin’ With The Boys, the hosts argued that her opponent should have stayed in the ring, rather than actually correct him about her gender status.Of course, no one is listening to a Barstool Sports podcast looking for heavy interrogation of a presidential candidate, and none of this seems likely to move the needle for truly undecided voters. (At best, it might raise a candidate’s profile among dudes who are undecided about whether they’ll remember to vote at all.) Maybe there was a point during the pre-Trump era where appearing approachable, sincere, funny or game on TV would change some minds in that classic Kennedy-over-Nixon way; the majority of voters seem too entrenched for that kind of perceptible shift today.That doesn’t make these shows aggressively marketing themselves as harmless, down to earth and essentially bipartisan are actually either of those things, though. Much as cultural critics are losing favor compared to friendlier, more “fun” influencers who serve as an ideally eager-to-please audience surrogate rather those cranky experts, actual journalists are losing ground to personalities like Joe Rogan – people in media positions who aren’t any more qualified to interview presidential candidates than a TV personality is to run the country. To wit: Harris is said to be considering an appearance on Rogan’s show because of its pull with a young and male audience. In the short term, in an close race, it might even make sense. But in pursuit of friendly, casual access to a lot of voters, candidates might well wind up in a podcast quagmire of their own making, where anyone can be turned into a harmless morning-zoo personality. By imitating the low-stakes bluster of sports talk, this chosen corner of the podcast world is upholding a questionable old-media tradition: turning a serious political moment back into a horse race. More

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    ‘People are complex’: Maria Bakalova on Donald Trump – and playing Ivana in The Apprentice

    The week Maria Bakalova was asked to consider playing Ivana Trump for the new film The Apprentice, she was in New York filming something else. With the meeting scheduled for her one day off, she spent the evening before trying to channel Donald Trump’s first wife. The film is set in the 70s and 80s, so she spent hours wading through photos of Ivana in that era. “A lot of makeup, a lot of hair,” she says. Bakalova laughs as she remembers spending the evening experimenting with a mushroom-like hairstyle and “heavy eyeliner with a lot of powder, like inches”, although she didn’t have an Ivana-esque wardrobe – “Am I gen Z or a millennial?” asks the 28-year-old. Either way, “We wear a lot of baggy clothes”, so she chose her most skintight outfit.She met the director Ali Abbasi in the middle of the day, feeling a little clownish in her Ivana cosplay. They spoke for a couple of hours, “about people growing up in post-communist countries – because [Ivana] was from Czechoslovakia, and I was born and raised in Bulgaria – which shapes your inner world, your thoughts. We talked a lot about the similarities of our stories.”View image in fullscreenIvana had been a competitive skier, with a place on the national junior team that allowed her to compete outside communist Czechoslovakia in the late 60s. By the mid-90s, when Bakalova was born, Bulgaria was no longer a socialist republic but, for most people, travel outside the country was still rare. As a child, Bakalova, a competitive singer, got to travel to competitions all around Europe. It opened her eyes and instilled a sense of independence.This is Bakalova’s highest profile role since her big break in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2020 mockumentary sequel about the Kazakhstani reporter Borat Sagdiyev. She played Borat’s daughter, Tutar, in a performance so cringingly brilliant it got her an Oscar nomination. Despite this early success, Bakalova says her agents warned her not to get her hopes up about the role of Ivana – higher profile US actors were also in the running. “What I think is important is that [Abbasi] gave a chance to an eastern European to compete,” she says. “To have the opportunity, rather than just playing a prostitute or a crazy Russian scientist or a mobster or somebody that is just in the background with a few lines.”It was six months before she found out that she’d got the role, followed by a tortuous journey to get the film made and released. In a Vanity Fair piece, the film’s screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman, detailed the various obstacles – actors who didn’t want to “humanise” Trump, Hollywood studios and streamers who wouldn’t finance it, Trump’s Muslim travel ban that made it difficult for Abbasi, who is Iranian and based in Denmark, to work in the US (as well as the actors’ strikes and a global pandemic). The Apprentice’s largest investor, a film-making son-in-law of a billionaire and prominent Trump donor, reportedly threatened to sink the film once he’d seen it, because of a scene in which the Trump character appears to rape his wife. Ivana alleged Trump raped her in her divorce deposition, but later retracted. Trump’s lawyers sent the film-makers cease-and-desist letters and the big American distributors wouldn’t touch it. “Hollywood fashions itself as a community of truth tellers,” wrote Sherman, “but here they were running from a movie to prepare for a Trump presidency.”“We’ve been facing a bit of difficulty to release it,” says Bakalova, with comic understatement.In the film, Trump (played by a toupeed Sebastian Stan) is ambitious but slightly awkward and in the shadow of his father, then mentored and moulded by nefarious lawyer Roy Cohn (played, typically magnificently, by Succession’s Jeremy Strong). A cinephile, Bakalova was desperate to work with Abbasi – she was a huge fan of his work, including Holy Spider, the Iranian serial killer film. She wanted, she says, to be involved in his “dive into the underbelly of the American empire”. The more she researched Trump’s first wife – and the mother of three of his children – the more she found herself fascinated by how much Ivana achieved on her own. “She wanted to be Donald’s partner,” she says. Ivana is credited with promoting the couple’s 80s glitz, she was involved in running part of his businesses and managed New York’s Plaza hotel. “I think she was the reason he achieved so much early because she was very smart, very ambitious.”In the film, the power balance between Ivana and Donald is in her favour at the start of their relationship; Ivana is horrified at the idea of a prenup, and the measly amount it would give her in the event of a separation, and negotiates a better deal. “I saw an interview with her after the divorce, saying she didn’t know anything about prenups, and why do you need to have them? But if you’re going to play this game that way, if that’s going to be the picture of our marriage, OK, I’m going to play the same way.”How did she feel about the inclusion of the alleged rape in the film? Trump has always denied the allegations, since retracted by Ivana, who died in 2022. Bakalova says she trusted Sherman. “Do I think it’s important to have it out there?” she says. “Do I think it’s a crucial scene for both of the characters? It is, because we see somebody completely dismissing the person who built him in a lot of ways, who gave birth to his children. Not only physically, but verbally as well.”She says she doesn’t think it matters if the film “humanises” Trump (reviews have said it lacks bite). “When you dive deeper into a human being, there’s always good and bad sides, and there are always decisions that you make based on circumstances, people you surround yourself with, that change your point of view … I think we should step away from the idea of demonising people or creating idols, because people are complex.”View image in fullscreenThe Borat sequel was released less than two weeks before the 2020 US election, with the words “now vote” flashed up at the end. The Apprentice is also coming out around election time. Is it intended to have any influence? No, says Bakalova – it’s been too long in the making for any kind of intentional timing. “This is not a political film, this is not a hit piece,” she says. Although there are clear echoes, deafening in parts, of who the Trump character will later become. “Will it change opinions? I don’t know. But I feel like the biggest privilege that we have living in a democracy is to share our voices and to have an opinion, one way or another.”Bakalova grew up in Burgas, a city on the Black Sea coast. Her mother was a nurse, and her father a chemist; she is an only child. They were considered middle-class, she says, but she remembers as a child that nobody in Bulgaria had much.“Because of communism and because of inflation, because of a lot of things. I remember back in the 90s, chewing gum going from 100 bucks to 10 bucks to one penny.” They were comfortable, financially, she says, “but it’s not so easy that you can allow yourself to just rest and wait for something to happen. You know that you have to do something if you’re going to succeed.”Her love of the arts started with music. Her father would play the guitar at home, and she grew up listening to rock music and wanting to emulate those musicians. “Unfortunately, again, growing up in Bulgaria and in a place that still has some kind of patriarchy mindset, playing guitar is a little bit too masculine.” Instead, she became a flautist and was also singing in the choirs that would take her around Europe to various competitions.When she was 12, she damaged her voice and stopped singing for several months to rest it. “I started reading a lot of books and imagining that I’m in different places, I want to be like these characters. How can you somehow escape real life and imagine that you’re somebody else? That was the starting point of me falling in love with acting.” Later, Bakalova would study at Sofia’s National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts.She loves theatre and arthouse cinema, but she laughs and says “I’m not going to hide that I was always dreaming about Hollywood and America and cinema.” She remembers drawing the Hollywood sign in an exercise book at school, and writing that she was going to be “a great movie star someday. But of course, my last name finishes with ‘o-v-a’, and I didn’t see that in a lot of credits at the end of films.” One teacher told her that if she wanted to expand beyond Bulgarian film, she should try to get involved in the types of films shown on the European festival circuit.View image in fullscreenBakalova discovered the Danish avant garde Dogme 95 movement and, during her final year of university, used some of her scholarship money to buy flights to Copenhagen for her and her parents. She had an ambitious plan to march into the offices of Lars von Trier’s production company, Zentropa. “I was, like, ‘I’m going there, and I’m going to say, ‘I am willing to work here for free, to study, to learn how you guys do all of these incredible movies.’” She laughs, remembering her and her mother in the rain, Googling the office address. (They were kind, but sent her away, saying she would have to be fluent in Danish, which she then vowed to study.)Not long afterwards, Bakalova was shooting a Bulgarian French film, Women Do Cry, in which she played a young woman with HIV, when she heard through a friend about a project, which she would later find out was Borat, which required an eastern European actor. So secretive was the process that she feared she was being conned into human trafficking, but she was also tempted by the chance to audition in the UK – she thought she might get a chance, somehow, to meet the British director Andrea Arnold.In Borat, her character Tutar dreams of becoming like “Princess Melania” and becomes the “gift” Borat is supposed to deliver to one of Trump’s men, first the vice-president Mike Pence, and then Rudy Giuliani, to strengthen relations between their countries. Bakalova was a revelation in the film, infusing her character with a life-changing feminist trajectory while also having to pull off some excruciating scenes with “real” people, including leading an anti-abortion campaigner at a clinic to believe she was pregnant with her father’s baby and describing, to a group of women at a Republican conference, having just masturbated for the first time in the loos.“I don’t know how I did it,” she laughs. “I don’t know if I will I ever be able to do it again. It’s so strange, and I think that is why Sacha’s work is so brilliant. He challenges people, he does these movies that are like a social experiment of how far can you go?” It was “definitely difficult” she says. With only one shot, did it feel like a lot of pressure not to mess it up, or come out of character? “Sacha was so gracious, he was holding my hand every step of the way and guiding me, and I trusted him.”View image in fullscreenThere is a scene with Giuliani, which created a lot of attention. Tutar, by now a reporter for a rightwing news channel, is conducting a fawning interview with the former New York mayor and attorney to Trump in a hotel suite, before suggesting they go to the bedroom. Giuliani is filmed lying back on the bed with his hands down the front of his trousers (later, he claimed he was rearranging his clothes after removing a microphone). Was it the plan to get him in the bedroom? “You can only plan so much, but it’s about real people, real places, real situations. You can have goals that you want to achieve, but it depends on the moment. It was ideal to see how far things can get.” Was she nervous? “It was nerve-racking, because you don’t know how these things are going to turn. We worked with a great team of people. We had a great security team, we had a great stunt team. We had a lot of people that made sure we were all safe.”It helps, she says, having female producers – Monica Levinson on Borat, and Amy Baer on The Apprentice. “It’s important to have a female perspective behind the scenes, [and] if you’re doing such challenging roles, both as Ivana or Tutar, having a female there looking after you, looking after the story.”Bakalova has voiced a character in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 (Cosmo the Spacedog), was in the dark comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies and has just finished shooting a family drama, Learning to Breathe Underwater – but in Borat and The Apprentice, her two standout films are about Trump. It is strange, she admits, but adds: “I think Borat is not about Trump. I do find a few similarities between the movies because they explore the American empire, and that land that we all have heard is the place you can feel freedom and opportunity. But both movies show there is always a dark side to it.” The Apprentice is released in cinemas on 18 October. More

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    The high life: Kamala Harris cracks open a beer with Stephen Colbert

    When they go low, she goes high. Miller High Life to be precise.Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, took her election campaign to late night television on Tuesday by cracking open a can of the lager with host Stephen Colbert. The moment set her apart from Joe Biden and Donald Trump – both, famously, teetotallers.The vice-president also used the interview in New York’s Ed Sullivan Theater to lambast Trump over a report that he sent Covid testing kits to Russia’s Vladimir Putin even as US citizens went without. “He thinks, well, that’s his friend,” she said. “What about the American people? They should be your first friend.”The appearance before a live audience capped a media blitz for Harris who, having previously been criticised for dodging interviews, spoke in recent days to CBS’s 60 Minutes, the podcast Call Her Daddy, the daytime show The View and radio host Howard Stern.The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has featured Harris, Biden and numerous other politicians over the years, blending serious political issues with light relief. During Tuesday’s interview in New York, he noted that people are calling this “the vibe election” and that voters typically want a candidate they can have a beer with.He duly invited Harris to share a drink and said she had requested Miller High Life in advance. The vice-president remarked: “OK, the last time I had beer was at a baseball game with Doug. Cheers.”Harris repeated the popular slogan “The champagne of beers”, while Colbert noted that it comes from Milwaukee, in the swing state of Wisconsin. He said: “So that covers Wisconsin. Let’s talk Michigan. Let’s appeal to the Michigan voters, OK? What are your favourite Bob Seger songs?”The host proceeded to reel off a list of Seger songs but Harris did not appear enthusiastic. Finally, she said: “I’ll go Aretha or Eminem. You got any?”The 40-minute interview, due to be broadcast on CBS on Tuesday night, also tackled serious topics. Colbert asked about the 7 October attack by Hamas and Israel’s response. Harris said: “We must have a ceasefire and hostage deal as immediately as possible. This war has got to end. It has to end.”Progress on a deal for a ceasefire and the release of hostages is “meaningless”, she acknowledged, until it is reached. Harris said she has met with the families of hostages and the families of Palestinians killed in Gaza. “We’ve got to get a deal done and we’re not going to give up.”The interview took place after it emerged that journalist Bob Woodward writes in his new book, War, that Trump has had as many as seven private phone calls with Putin since leaving office and secretly sent the Russian president Covid test machines in 2020. Trump has denied the claims.Harris commented: “He openly admires dictators and authoritarians. He has said he wants to be a dictator on day one if he were elected again as president. He gets played by these guys. He admires so-called strongmen and he gets played because they flatter him or offer him favour.”Referring to the Covid test kits, she went on: “I ask everyone here and everyone who is watching: do you remember what those days were like? You remember how many people did not have tests and were trying to scramble to get them?”Harris became visibly irate as she recalled that hundreds of people were dying every day, some comforted only by nurses because their families could not reach them.
    “And this man is giving Covid test kits to Vladimir Putin? Think about what this means on top of him sending love letters to Kim Jong-un. He thinks, well, that’s his friend. What about the American people? They should be your first friend.”Earlier Colbert asked Harris about a now celebrated image of her in the presidential debate against Trump in which she frowned and rested her chin on a hand. Asked what she was thinking at that moment, she replied: “It’s family TV, right? It starts with a W, there’s a letter between it, then the last letter’s F.” She burst into laughter.The comedian asked if Trump lost the 2020 election, something he has always denied. Harris said: “You know, when you lost millions of jobs, you lost manufacturing, you lost automotive plants, you lost the election. What does that make you? A loser. This is what somebody at my rallies said. I thought it was funny.”She laughed and Colbert remarked: “It’s accurate. It’s accurate.”Then Harris pointed out: “This is what happens when I drink beer!” More