Ioana Bugarin. I don’t even know how to describe her, not because I don’t know her, but mostly because so many people before me have spoken about her, in beautiful and truthful ways. What might differentiate me from all the others is that we come from the same generation. There are only three years between us, which makes me empathize a lot with her. I admit I find myself in Ioana much more than in any of the other personalities I have interviewed along the way, even though she’s much more tactful and clever than I was at her age – most certainly the profession she has chosen for herself helps her mature more rapidly. 

At only 25 years old, Ioana is an actor of Odeon Theatre in Bucharest, has starred as a main character in two feature films, one of which is available now in cinemas, and has played in many other films and shorts. Soon enough she’ll make her television debut in RUXX, the newest production by HBO Romania (launched in March on HBO Max).

I’ve been thinking of an interview with her for some time now and even my colleagues (Ruxandra and Sabina) have insisted for almost a year now to invite her for a photo shoot, there was never the right time. Until now. We met with Ioana on a sunny Sunday, after a postponement and a little bit of panic due to the cruel and the infamous Covid, super thrilled we finally did this. We spent 4 hours in the attic of unteatru’s theatre, where we talked about her career as an actress, feminism, education and self-education. We laughed, we ate sushi and we creatively conspired for our photoshoot which – with all modesty – turned out extremely well.

It was the kind of working Sunday when you don’t feel at all you’re working, Ioana has a contagious energy. She throws ideas at you, she’s not afraid to try any crazy proposal, as long as it’s not cliche – a thing she loathes, especially if you fit her in some predefined stereotypes. Ioana is different and she wouldn’t stand being any other way. She’s a convinced feminist, sensitive and brave, grateful she was born in an era where women are not seen anymore as inferior to men – even though, she admits we still have a long way to go until we’re equal. 

There’s so much to say about Ioana Bugarin. However, I feel my introduction is quickly turning into a portrait so without further ado, I will let you get to know her better from our discussion below.

Ioana, what is a compliment to you? 

I have a very complicated relationship with compliments, there are moments when I still fight with the impostor syndrome. Usually I’m uptight when I receive a physical one. I have no accomplishment in the way I look, but it’s the first thing people observe about me.

But do you feel you need them, does this kind of validation help you grow and develop your career?

Of course it feeds my ego, it is a necessary form of validation which makes it even more absurd. I have such an ambivalent relationship with them, in a way it helps, they make me feel better in my own skin, but they also make me feel abashed.

Tell me about your childhood. How were you brought up?

I think it was like any other childhood – with both good and bad. My parents have always been hard working and steady, I was brought up in a family where they supported me to be whatever version of myself I want to become – I did ballet, dance classes, guitar, singing lessons, tennis, they never imposed anything on myself, neither have they obliged me to excel in an extracurricular activity. You don’t want to anymore, you stop practicing.

There were moral principles – to be on the level, to respect the ones around you, to work with earnest – these very basic and rational principles would meet somewhere in the middle with the religious ones. That was a bit odd.

You’re the most popular actress in Romanian cinema right now. Where do you find the energy for all the projects you get into?

I don’t know (laughs). I think it’s a model I’ve seen in my family as I was growing up, my parents have always been very hard-working – speaking of childhood. Today I’m admiring them and how they changed they field of work at 50 years old and they still have the same energy they had 20 years ago.

Being an actress was a dream which turned into reality.

Somehow, every time I feel tired or like I have reached a dead end, I remember myself I have everything I wanted so I should not whine, but do the work. It’s a sort of gratitude that keeps me going. With every role given comes a lot of responsibility and I treat it very seriously.

Do you have any energy left for other things you might like? What are your hobbies?

I have just started discovering my identity outside my professional life. I find myself to be quite trivial (laughs). I like reading, watching movies, seeing with friends, and traveling. Lately I’ve experienced this great combo between work and travel, going to so many film festivals. All the meetings with the audiences and the Q&A’s felt more like gratification moments; I had time to walk around the cities, visit museums.

I know you also paint, from time to time.

I discovered this way of entertaining through a close friend. I grew up thinking I have no talent whatsoever, I was even scared to hold a pencil in my hand. Now I have discovered I don’t need to capitalize my paintings, not even show them to anyone, I do not need validation for the things I do only for myself, it’s a therapeutic process, in the end – like a visual journal.

And don’t you feel you discover stuff about yourself? – I ask you this because I have also discovered this activity, recently, and with it I discovered what a great way of self-educating myself it can be, and also a way of getting to know myself better – if you can observe yourself when you paint; from what you paint to how you use your brush.

Indeed, it feels like a mirror into the brain’s universe. Like you say, sometimes I use thick, stuffy strokes, even harsh. Other times it seems I fall into impressionism, using pastel colors and lots of dots – it surely reflects the way I feel.

How would a painting inspired by your life look like?

I have many times painted on two plates – one very structured, straight lines, a kind of mathematical composition versus the other one, having the same colors but splashed around, with undefined contours. Both very abstract and very different from one another. It’s how I am – when I work, I’m very rigorous and precise and when I’m me, sometimes I don’t even know how the day passes, I forget to wash my laundry, I like over sleeping. I have many personalities.

Let’s talk about you as an actress. Today you’re Juliet or Ophelia in a theater play and tomorrow you’re Cristina (from Miracle) or Mia (from Mia misses her revenge) in film and this rhythm goes on and on. How do you bounce from one character to the other, maintaining your own identity? And how do you detach from it all, at the end of the day? I know it’s a process you learn in time.

I’m trying to develop a mental discipline.

I have discovered that sometimes, to get out of my mind and back into my body it helps listening to some music and dance, or shake myself, or have a shower – somewhere at a symbolic level, I think some boundaries are being established, between what I did and what I’m about to do next. The more I train myself in this direction, the better I am at this.

However, sometimes I keep within me parts of the characters I play, without realizing it. I still don’t know exactly where the character ends and where I begin because everytime I work at one, the foundation of each character is myself. And from there I start building and then I increase or decrease various aspects. Looking back, there were characters that stayed with me even after I finished a project.

You mentioned these rituals that help you. How have you discovered them – was it pure intuition, have you seen them anywhere or has anyone mentioned any of it?

I remembered the advice I got in college, when I was studying in London. Then a friend suggested meditation to me and my mom (who is a psychologist) suggested I should try some exercises in order to get rid of all the tension I have in me, like shaking myself. Dancing came intuitively. 

Because you brought up London, where you studied for one year at RADA and you also mentioned in many of your interviews that’s where you learned everything you know, I want to ask you – what tools do you use now, when you work at one of your characters?

As I gradually dive more into this career, the lines I set between the methods I learned start to vanish. Depending on each role, I go through improvisation to figure out where I have to dig deeper. A very important part for me is text analysis. I spend a lot of time on a screenplay, cutting it into pieces, discovering the intentions behind each action. I write on paper what’s the purpose, the objectives – I call it detective work.

For the role of Cristina (n. the main character in Miracle) where I had almost no text, I had to use different tools. It was a role where I acted based only on feelings, looks, breaths, it was a very different way to work.

In the end, I throw myself out there, believing I have gathered a lot of information in my research, that will activate without me even thinking.

You mentioned to Ionut Mares in our column – Emerging Voices, that for Mia misser her revenge and Otto the barbarian, you had a lot of time to get to know your characters, as you jumped in both projects from early on. Was it the same situation with Miracle, where you play Cristina Tofan?

I went to a casting, then I had two more and then they gave me the role. I was in a creative residency, playing in Itinerarii (R: Eugen Jebeleanu) when I got the news. There was a mutual trust between myself and Bogdan (n. Apetri, the director). He recommended some movies to watch, I also brought some films into discussion, to figure out if we see Cristina in the same way. I read a lot, kept a diary, had some meetings with Emanuel Parvu to rehearse some key scenes in the movies, I had around four months for all of that. I even stayed for a week in the monastery we filmed in. I gave up my phone, went to all liturgies, prayed – I tried to get deep into the character’s universe, emotionally and sensory, to understand some things that intellectually I just couldn’t. Even though I was brought up in a religious way, in the last years I have taken a step back and it helped me reconnect to my spiritual side. And it was a great help observing the nuns, even though I didn’t want to imitate them. They have a specific type of behavior, which inspired me.

I watched Basmofilia/Fairy Fever (dir. Tudor Cristian Jurgiu), a film recommended to me by my colleague, Călin Boto – and I really enjoyed it. In this shot film, which I know you co-wrote together with Tudor, you play the role of a punky, lesbian and visibly troubled girl, who seems to be speaking in tongues – it looks to me like a fatal combo. And a difficult one as well.

I enjoyed very much working with Tudor behind and in front of the camera. We both had questions regarding identity, sexuality, childhood. And we were just discovering Lynch and Apichatpong. Tudor was fond of fairytales, so we were experimenting with characters. It all came naturally. I believe that our sexuality is much more fluid than we are taught to believe, and if you set aside your preconceived notions, you can find that everything exists within yourself.

Yet it’s not that easy to set your prejudice aside.

No, of course not, especially not in a country like Romania. The fact that we wrote the script together meant that we entered a very playful process. For me, it was exciting to intersect something serious – something that discusses sexuality, female sensuality, which can be fluid; my character, even though she is part of a lesbian couple, describes a bisexual fantasy, so we played around with this idea, just how fluid the borders of sexuality can be – and then there were her sleepwalking episodes, which had something mystical about them. The compatibility between me and Cătălina (Bălălău) also helped a lot, I remember that we were sitting around, the three of us, and we were talking and rehearsing. At some point I had a moment of hesitation when I felt I didn’t want to act in it anymore. I was afraid that I wouldn’t cut it. 

Did you also feel this sort of fear when you were involved in other projects, as well?

I also felt afraid in Mia (n. Mia Misses Her Revenge) – I went to the shoot without having read the script. It was a long process of improvisation, everything developed during the shooting, even though we had a lot of rehearsals.

In acting, when it comes down to each role, you have several options of “how to” and, of course, you’re working with the director, your co-actors, but oftentimes you find yourself alone, facing several choices and there is always this question – did I took the best one?

Besides, when it comes to films, you put a lot of yourself into the shoot, but then afterwards, you no longer have any sort of control over the material; the way in which it is edited, the takes that are chosen, and so naturally, you get scared, because you become aware that what you will see in the end is the final product.

How do you see yourself, when you watch the films in which you starred? What passes through your mind in those moments?

First off, I get tense and I always feel that there’s room for improvement. That’s the part of me that I try to rein in, but then there’s also a lot of joy. A lot of quasi-contradictory feelings co-exist in such moments. I feel shame, fear, discontent, and, at the same time, gratitude, ecstasy, happiness that I am there.

You are an introspective person who seems to absorb and learn something from everything that you’re doing. What do you learn from the profession that you have chosen for yourself, how does it influence your development, your process of maturing? 

I’ll start off with a joke – through the nature of the roles that I find all around myself, I felt the increasing need to become a feminist (laughs).

I had the chance to encounter some really nice characters, and I am also benefiting from a sort of a recent shift in paradigm when it comes to the general mentality towards women. Until not long ago, there were very few female protagonists on screen. The world to which we were exposed to as spectators was an exclusively male one, women were “on the side”. Acting is an exercise which works and trains my empathy quite a lot. It makes me pay a lot more attention to people, and it teaches me to even accept the lack of control that I may have. It teaches me to savor all of the intense moments I experience.

It sounds like a sort of therapy to me.

It really is a bit. 

What does evolution mean to you and what are its limits, if any? And I don’t necessarily just your personal evolution, but also that of humankind.

I think for me evolution is the synonym of curiosity. For some, it’s exactly the opposite, it’s when they can stop and take a look at what they have – it’s difficult, it’s hard to define it. But I really think that it means staying curious, whether you’re giving, whether you’re taking, whether you’re standing still or moving, in any way this can be interpreted.

Death is quite clearly a terminal point. And I’m very afraid of it.

I absolutely believe that irresponsible evolution can sometimes be destructive. When you feel that you must always do more, this sensation of not being sufficient. I am scared of this idea, according to which human beings are at the center of the world in which we’re living. We are part of nature, and this constant attempt of ours to prove that we are smarter than her can have some really negative effects.

Do you think that cinema and theater will still be the same twenty years from now, when you will probably still act?

I have no idea, I don’t know. As I grow up, instead of having more and more certainties, I have more and more questions. I realize just how little I know. A few years ago I probably would have started to make assumptions.

In the end, I’m curious what you think were the ingredients of your luck and success. Just as you mentioned to Ionuț Mareș, you’re a lucky one – you graduated in 2019 and you were hired at the Odeon Theater the same year, then the roles just kept on lining up, so you didn’t have the chance to feel what it means to have uncertainties, what it means to not act, or for your phone to stay silent.

I definitely was very lucky and I think that I was in the right place, at the right time on many occasions, and I have no merits for that, but, of course, I also know to accept these chances and to work for them. I got a role, I went ahead and I worked for it. But I am privileged to have grown up in a good family and to have received a proper education. 

Do you sometimes feel judged for all of these “privileges”?

Sometimes. And I’m afraid that I might be indecent in my happiness and in my success and I have the tendency to minimize them. I am aware that there’s a lot of talented people out there that simply did not have the right circumstances to show it. And that always reminds me how grateful I am.

Laura Mușat

Film producer and founder of ADFR, she dreamed since she was little of having a magazine one day. Alongside her job as editor-in-chief, she writes the interview of the month. She loves animals, jazz music and films festivals.