For his sequel to Borat, Cohen spent months infiltrating real-life situations as the fake Kazakhstani journalist—targeting Mike Pence, a historic Georgia landmark, and, of course, Rudy Giuliani.
This piece contains major spoilers for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.
Before September 8, few people were aware that Sacha Baron Cohen had filmed a sequel to 2006’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Then the website Collider reported that Cohen had shot the film in secret, before and during the coronavirus pandemic, with an eye toward releasing it before the American presidential election. Six weeks later, Borat 2—officially titled Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan—isn’t just a reality: it’s available now via Amazon Prime Video.
But despite the top-secret nature of the project, Cohen had actually been hiding his Borat sequel in plain sight for months—drawing both suspecting and unsuspecting headlines about the many stunts he concocted for the new film. Ahead, a spoiler-filled look at the many real-life public figures and institutions that unwittingly played a role in the making of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.
Hay House
After returning to America, Borat tries in vain to turn his daughter, Tutar (breakout newcomer Maria Bakalova), into the kind of woman he thinks would be an appropriate gift to Vice President Mike Pence. Tutar meets with Instagram influencer Macy Chanel, who suggests a total makeover—and the transformation leads to a debutante ball, where Borat and Tutar horrify the men and women in attendance with a graphic synchronized dance. It ends with Tutar proudly flashing her crotch, which is covered in fake blood, to the crowd.
This sequence was shot at the Hay House, a historic landmark in Macon, Georgia. Not that the venue’s operations staff was comfortable with what transpired. According to Hay House operations manager Cliff Sims, the Borat Subsequent Moviefilm shoot was allegedly booked under “false pretenses.”
“It was not discussed or approved by the Macon Film Commission,” Sims told a local television station after the Borat 2 trailer was released. “What was discussed with the production company during the initial rental is not what happened or transpired on site.”
Sims said that Borat producers claimed they were filming a coming-of-age story and hired local extras to participate in the stunt. He added that locals had no idea Cohen himself was present for the scene. “We didn’t know it was him until the video came out and one of my coworkers, who was working the event, said, ‘That was him. He was actually here,’” he said.
In a first-person piece published days after the trailer launch, one of the fathers who attended the event with his daughter wrote that attendees had been offered $100 per person to dress up and dance as part of a fictional scene of “Southern belles making their debut.” Those who volunteered were given an online quiz in which they were asked to identify Cohen, with respondents eventually split into two teams. “My friend had discovered that everyone on our Team B were those who could not identify Cohen in the online test,” he wrote.
Vice President Mike Pence
Shortly after the Hay House scene, Borat decides to move forward with his plan to give Tutar to the vice president. It’s late February of 2020, and he and Tutar head to the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, to see if they can secure time with Pence, a featured speaker.
Upon arrival, Cohen-as-Borat dresses in Klu Klux Klan robes and storms into the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Fort Washington, Maryland. He claims he’s Stephen Miller. But after he realizes this conspicuous outfit won’t allow him to gain access to Pence, Borat changes course. He dons a bodysuit and face mask to dress as President Donald Trump.
In his speech, Pence is shown downplaying the forthcoming coronavirus crisis. “As of today, we have 15 cases of coronavirus that have been detected in the United States with only one new case detected in the last two weeks,” Pence says. “While the risks to the American public remains low, as the president said yesterday, we’re ready. We’re ready for anything.” It’s at that point in the film that Cohen-as-Borat interrupts, holding Tutar over his shoulder and urging Pence to receive his “gift.”
“I spent five hours in makeup that morning with the prosthetic team changing my face into Trump’s face,” Cohen told the New York Times in an interview before release. “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.”
At the time, the stunt was covered by the press—but no one connected the disruptive impersonator to Cohen.
Judith Dim Evans
Cohen, rather memorably, condemned social media giants in a widely praised keynote address at an Anti-Defamation League event in 2019. So it’s of little surprise that he takes shots at Facebook in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. At one point, Tutar breaks her father’s heart by telling him the Holocaust didn’t happen, a conspiratorial lie she claims to have read on Facebook.
Crestfallen, Borat considers taking his own life. But “since I did not have money to buy a gun,” he narrates, “I went to the nearest synagogue to wait for the next mass shooting, disguised as a typical Jew.”
It’s there, in an offensive and shocking outfit that includes a lengthy prosthetic nose, that Borat is confronted by two Jewish elders, one of whom uses kindness and empathy to reach the anti-Semite in her midst.
“Do I look like I eat people? I’m an old, good women,” Judith Dim Evans, a Holocaust survivor and educator, tells Borat. “Look at me, I’m Jewish. Do I have a long nose?”
In the scene, Evans confirms to Borat that the Holocaust did happen. “I saw it with my own eyes,” she says. The punchline is that Borat feels invigorated by the news, and is then able to find a renewed purpose in his life.
The credits for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm features a dedication to Evans, who died earlier this year. But her family was not pleased that Cohen included Evans in his film. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Evans’s estate has sued Amazon over the interview.
“Upon learning after giving the interview that the movie was actually a comedy intended to mock the Holocaust and Jewish culture, Ms. Evans was horrified and upset,” the lawsuit read, per the publication. “Had Ms. Evans been informed about the true nature of the film and purpose for the interview, she would not have agreed to participate in the interview.”
According to Deadline, however, Evans was reportedly told the interview was meant to be satirical—something the Hollywood trade described as a rarity when it comes to Cohen’s work.
The March for Our Rights Rally
In June, with the coronavirus pandemic still raging and a largely conservative pushback against lockdowns and quarantines growing stronger and louder, Cohen-as-Borat crashed a right-wing rally in Olympia, Washington to perform an offensive and racist song about what he called the “Wuhan flu.”
“Obama was a traitor, America, he hate her. He belong inside the jails,” Cohen-as-Borat sings, affecting a country-western twang, at the March for Our Rights event. “I ain’t lying, ain’t no jokes, corona is a liberal hoax. Corona is a liberal hoax.”
He continues in song: “Obama, what we gonna do? Inject him with the Wuhan flu. Dr. Fauci, what we gonna do? Inject him with the Wuhan flu.”
Later, Cohen-as-Borat asks the crowd whether they should inject journalists with the coronavirus or “chop them up like the Saudis do.” The crowd cheers loudly.
Cohen’s prank was widely reported at the time—but again, it wasn’t directly connected to Borat 2.
“Disguised as a PAC out of Southern California, paid for the stage setup and musical entertainment. Came on stage disguised as the lead singer of the last band, singing a bunch of racist, hateful, disgusting shit,” Yelm City Councilman James Connor Blair wrote on Facebook at the time. “His security blocked event organizers from getting him off the stage or pulling power from the generator. After the crowd realized what he was saying, and turned on him, his security then rushed the stage and evacuated them to a waiting private ambulance that was contracted to be their escape transport.”
Rudy Giuliani
As has been widely covered already, Borat 2 ends with Tutar interviewing Giuliani in a hotel suite under the pretense of an interview about the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
In the scene, Giuliani alleges that “China manufactured the virus and let it out. They deliberately spread it all around the world.” He also refutes the notion that the virus spread from bats. “I don’t think anybody was eating bats. Did you ever have a bat?” he asks Tutar, before offering in apparent jest to “eat a bat” with her.
Throughout the scene, Tutar and Giuliani flirt with each other (at one point he tells the nervous reporter “I’ll relax you,” before grabbing her hands). Toward the end, on Tutar’s suggestion, the two head into the bedroom. There, Tutar helps Giuliani take off his microphone. He pats her lower back and asks for her contact information. Then, while laying back on the bed, he sticks his hands down his pants—an action Giuliani later said he did in an attempt to tuck in his shirt.
It’s at that moment that Cohen-as-Borat barges into the room and ends the interaction before anything further happens. Back in July, Giuliani got a jump on the scene, spoiling it in an interview with the New York Post and claiming he got the better of Cohen.
“I only later realized it must have been Sacha Baron Cohen. I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me,” he said. “I am a fan of some of his movies, Borat in particular, because I’ve been to Kazakhstan,” Giuliani added, before impersonating Borat: “‘She is my sister. She is number four prostitute in all of Kazakhstan.’ That was pretty funny.”
This week, however, no amount of preemptive spin could drive away negative headlines about the Giuliani scene. Shortly after the review embargo broke on Wednesday, Giuliani fired back at the film, claiming the sequence was “fabricated.”
“I was tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment,” Giuliani wrote on Twitter. “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.”
Election 2020
In the end, Borat comes to the realization the Jewish people aren’t to be feared and that, in truth, the American “Yankee” is the planet’s biggest scourge at the moment. In a twist on the first film’s “The Running of the Jew,” Borat Subsequent Moviefilm ends with the “Running of the Yankee,” where a pair of oversized Americans spread coronavirus and kill an effigy of Dr. Fauci. After a sweet moment with his daughter, the film cuts sharply to black and offers one final plea to viewers: “Now vote, or you will be execute.”
In his interview with the Times, Cohen said the political nature of the project had allegedly scared off some potential distributors. (Ultimately, Amazon Prime Video acquired Borat 2.) But his goal was always to release the film before the election on November 3, specifically, he said, as a way to influence women voters. “We wanted it to be a reminder to women of who they’re voting for—or who they’re not voting for,” Cohen said of his determination to have the film released before the election. “If you’re a woman and you don’t vote against this guy, then know what you’re doing for your gender.”
Christopher Rosen
Original article: Vanity Fair