Sacha Baron Cohen goes behind the making of Borat 2 Rudy Giuliani scene
Sacha Baron Cohen was in the room where it happened. "It," in case you haven't been keeping up with the Borat sequel discourse, is the now-infamous scene from Borat Subsequent Moviefilm with Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Cohen addressed the scene with Late Show host Stephen Colbert after Giuliani called the moment "a complete fabrication."
Actress Maria Bakalova, 24, costars with Cohen as Borat's 15-year-old daughter. In the scene involving Giuliani, she's posing as a right-wing TV personality who invites Giuliani back to her hotel room after conducting an interview. Giuliani is seen lying on a bed, reaching into his pants, when Cohen's Borat bursts in and exclaims, "She's 15! She's too old for you."
"The Borat video is a complete fabrication," Giuliani tweeted. "I was tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment. At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate. If Sacha Baron Cohen implies otherwise he is a stone-cold liar."
Speaking with Colbert for Monday night's episode, Cohen responded: "My feeling is, if he sees that as appropriate, then heaven knows what he's intended to do with other women in hotel rooms with a glass of whiskey in his hand."
Cohen explained that he was hiding out in a "hideaway" the production team built into the room's closet. "Rudy thought he was alone with her," the actor said. "He brought a cop with him, an ex-policeman, and the policeman does a sweep of the entire hotel suite. And I'm obviously running to get in there, jump in the hideaway, lock this thing shut. And I've got a little internal lock, and it's pitch black in there. Does a sweep and then leaves the room and then the security guard sits outside the room ensuring that no one could come in or out, which is actually even more scary when you think about it for her."
Cohen would then wait inside the hideout, holding for the director Jason Woliner to send him text messages as to what is happening in the room. As it happens, Cohen's cell was on 3-percent battery life, which complicated things.
Trump spoke out against Cohen and Borat, calling him a "creep" and a "phony." Cohen, who had interviewed Trump in the past as another comedic persona, Ali G, had a response for him, too.
"Well, I’m sure when he was hanging out with his good friend Jeffrey Epstein, they probably spent a lot of their time talking about how creepy I am," Cohen said. "And, yes, I am a professional phony like him."
In a separate portion of the Colbert interview, Cohen shared a deleted scene of what happened at a gun rally in Washington state that went oh so terribly wrong for him.
Cohen was under cover as Country Steve, who took the stage at the rally to sing a song called "The Wuhan Flu" about the coronavirus. "Everyone was singing along and the problem was that some of the militia groups that were in this rally had been antagonizing the Black Lives Matter protests," he explained. "And so, as revenge, some of the Black Lives Matter protestors were coming over to confront them."
According to Cohen, there were BLM protestors undercover at the rally to scope out the scene and one of them recognized Cohen. "They see me on stage and everyone's singing along and one of them went 'Oh my God! It's Sacha Baron Cohen!' starts laughing, tells the other one," the actor continued. "Word got out that it was me and then the [gun rally] organizers and a lot of people in the crowd got very angry. They tried to storm the stage. Luckily for me, I had hired the security, so it took them a while to actually storm the stage."
The results were not, as Borat says, very nice.
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