Sacha Baron Cohen Fooled Everyone With His ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’ Stunts

By now, you’ve surely heard about that Rudy Giuliani interview from Borat Subsequent Moviefilm — the new sequel to 2006’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan — but what about the fake Kazakhstani journalist’s other pranks? How did Borat get footage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, for example? And how did he end up performing on stage at the March for Our Rights Rally? Read on for behind-the-scenes details from the outrageous mockumentary.

In the film, directed by Jason Woliner, Borat dons a bodysuit to dress up like President Donald Trump and crashes Mike Pence’s speech at the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference, offering his daughter, Tutar, as a gift for the vice president.

Sacha Baron Cohen, the actor behind Borat, later told The New York Times that he hid in a hotel bathroom for hours to score the footage.

“Bear in mind, I spent five hours in makeup that morning with the prosthetic team changing my face into Trump’s face,” he recalled. “This fat suit is huge. It’s a 56-inch fat suit to turn my waist into Trump’s because we had estimated that was the most realistic. Then I ended up hiding in the bathroom, listening to conservative men go to the toilet for five hours until I broke into the room. We were surrounded by Secret Service and police and internal security.”

Baron Cohen famous trolled the attendees of the March for Our Rights Rally in Olympia, Wash., in June 2020, getting the far-right rally attendees to sing along to racist lyrics. His stunt immediately made headlines, though few people knew at the time that Baron Cohen was filming a Borat sequel.

Per IndieWire, Yelm City Councilman James Connor Blair wrote on Facebook that Baron Cohen had “security [blocking] event organizers from getting him off the stage or pulling power from the generator.”

Once the crowd turned on him, Blair added, the security detail “rushed the stage and evacuated them to a waiting private ambulance that was contracted to be their escape transport.”

For the cringe-worthy scene in which Borat and his daughter, Tutar, perform their “fertility dance” at a debutante ball, Baron Cohen filmed at the historic Hay House in Macon, Ga.

One of the fathers present for the stunt later wrote that a production company hired fathers and daughters to be extras in a scene of Southern belles making their debut — and that the extras earned $100 apiece. Before the filming, though, the filmmakers sent the extras an online quiz about pop culture, and the ones who didn’t identify Baron Cohen in the quiz were the ones who were invited to film with the actor.

In the film, Borat bunks in with two QAnon proponents — Jim and Jerry — in small-town Washington after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

As Baron Cohen told the Times, those scenes are real — he really was living with the Trump-supporting roomies. “The hardest thing I had to do was, I lived in character for five days in this lockdown house,” the actor revealed.

“I was waking up, having breakfast, lunch, dinner, going to sleep as Borat when I lived in a house with these two conspiracy theorists. You can’t have a moment out of character.”

Baron Cohen also expressed empathy for his lockdown company: “They’re ordinary folks who are good people, who have just been fed this diet of lies. They’re completely different to the politicians who are motivated by their own power, who realized that they can create fear by spreading these lies through the most effective propaganda machine in history.”