Her newest film, Bodies Bodies Bodies, is a darkly comedic psychological horror movie directed by Halina Reijn.

Club recently spoke with the the 26-year-old Bakalova about her Bodies work, her Borat audition experience, social media, joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and more.

Club: Bodies Bodies Bodies is a horror film and a whodunnit, but it’s also sprinkled with generational social commentary.

How did it read on the page, and did a movie like this check a professional box for you?

It’s so contemporary and relatable and interesting and at the same time high-quality—an elevated mixture of genres.

Seeing it on screen, I’m like, “Whoa, I’m so lucky,” and it’s beautiful.

It speaks to my generation but at the same time I feel like it’s a universal experience because people that are way older or even younger can relate to the movie, because it’s about the time and real world that we live in?

They are kind of like “frenemies.” They call each other friends based on shared memories and some previous experiences that might have been created just by their parents, who decided to bring these people together because their families have been friends.

If these people meet each other today [for the first time] I’m not sure they would actually be friends.

But somehow we tend to compare ourselves to the images we see out there and we just happen to use language that we sometimes don’t know the meaning of.

It’s actually still somewhere on my computer and I’ll be excited to go back and read it one day because I think I wrote it in one night, when I was in England shooting The Bubble.

That was the time when we were like, “Okay, the movie will happen probably,” so I knew I had to get to work.

And I was like, “What, it’s actually real?!” Because things like that usually don’t happen to people like us, people from Eastern Europe, people with accents, people with different backgrounds.

MB: I had never done improv before, but I did acquire the capability of being in the moment, and not having the privilege of a second take—because these are real people, and you just have to go for it, now or never.

So you try to do different people, different characters, and go to all of them with respect, because it’s so much more that you can experience just by living your life.

I just like to try to fill the shoes of somebody that I never met before, and get to know these people.

MB: It’s been just incredible, and I feel like the luckiest person to be on that set and meet those people because not only are they great actors, not only are they giving it their all, using their imagination all the time—because you really have to imagine, which brings you back to the very beginning of acting—but on top of everything they are incredibly good people, beautiful human brings.