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Sacha Baron Cohen returns as Borat to take on Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and Kanye West
WAWAWEEWA, Borat is back and he is not for the faint-hearted.
The clueless Kazakh journalist is still as brazenly sexist, anti-Semitic and crude in the sequel to the 2006 mockumentary.
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But this time Borat, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, dips his toe in American politics and not even President Donald Trump or his predecessor Barack Obama can escape his meddling.
Other targets include rapper Kanye West, the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, as well as the unsuspecting public.
In Borat 2 — officially titled Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery Of Prodigious Bribe To American Regime For Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan — he attempts to build relations with the United States. And he has his daughter Tutar Sagdiyev for company.
Out tomorrow on Amazon Prime Video, it starts with Borat presenting Vice President Mike Pence with a monkey. But Tutar, played by Irina Novak, eats said animal, and Borat offers his daughter up as a replacement.
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The most talked about scene — an unnerving encounter with Trump’s personal attorney and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, 76 — almost saw Sacha arrested in July.
Hidden cameras in a New York hotel suite captured Giuliani reaching into his trousers after Tutar, pretending to be a flirtatious TV journalist, leads him into the bedroom.
Borat then interrupts them, shouting, “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”
'I HID IN TOILET AT TRUMP RALLY FOR FIVE HOURS'
Giuliani called the cops and said at the time: “This guy comes running in, wearing a crazy, what I would say was a, pink transgender outfit.
“It was a pink bikini, with lace, it looked absurd. He had the beard, bare legs, and wasn’t what I would call distractingly attractive.”
Sacha, 49, had to wear various disguises as the success of the first movie — Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan — means Borat is too recognisable.
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After its release 14 years ago Sacha believed he would never be able to make a sequel.
He said: “When I was being Ali G and Borat I was in character sometimes 14 hours a day and I came to love them, so admitting I am never going to play them again is quite a sad thing.”
But Sacha, who was born in Hammersmith, London, found a way to revive the bumbling character, with Borat masquerading as a Klu Klux Klan member and a singing fat cowboy, who takes to the stage at a gun-toting rally.
And, of course, given the publicity around the audacious stunt at a Conservative rally in Maryland in February, he dresses as Trump.
Carrying his daughter over his shoulder, Borat interrupts the event by calling out to Vice President Mike Pence: “I brought the girl for you!”
Speaking to The New York Times, Sacha recalled the difficulties he faced gaining access to the event.
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He said that after realising that security was there to “check everyone’s bodies going through” he began to wonder, “How do I get in and how do I get out?”
Sacha added: “Bear in mind, I spent five hours in make-up that morning with the prosthetic team changing my face into Trump’s face.
“This fat suit is huge. It’s a 56in fat suit to turn my waist into Trump’s because we had estimated that was the most realistic.”
After a security guard’s wand began beeping, the actor was forced to improvise and claim it was because of his defibrillator.
He said: “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.”
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Sacha, who has been married to Australian actress Isla Fisher, 44, for ten years and has three children, faced a monumental backlash from the first Borat film, despite it grossing £199million.
It was banned in almost all Arab countries, and the governments of Russia and Kazakhstan discouraged cinemas from showing it.
Kazakh nationals as well as Romanians from Glod, where Kazakhstan scenes were filmed, slammed the film.
Two Americans attempted to sue producers for portraying them in the movie as rapists and criminals.
At the time, Sacha said: “I was surprised because I always had faith in the audience that they would realise that this was a fictitious country and the mere purpose of it [the film] was to allow people to bring out their own prejudices.
"The reason we chose Kazakhstan was because it was a country that no one had ever heard anything about, so we could essentially play on stereotypes they might have about this ex-Soviet backwater.
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“The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people, who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist, who believe that there’s a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and women live in cages.”
Sacha was also punched in New York when he approached a man and talked to him in the style of his Kazakh alter-ego.
I always had faith in the audience that they would realise that this was a fictitious country.
He would have been forgiven for toning down his latest movie, but if anything, the characters and hoaxes are more daring and outrageous.
The Giuliani stunt was an amazing coup for Sacha, and a brave move to take on Trump and his trusted advisers.
Yet he says it was having to stay in character for five days that he found the most challenging part of the movie.
As filming continued during the coronavirus pandemic, Borat moves into a cabin with two male Republicans, who tell him “facts” like, “Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of children.”
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He said: “It was the hardest thing I had to do. 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.”
The film is one day from its release, but Sacha is already the subject of a lawsuit.
In one scene Cambridge-educated Sacha, who is an observant Jew, celebrates the Holocaust as “our nation’s proudest moment” and enters a synagogue with a long Pinocchio-like nose, carrying a bag of swag.
There he greets Holocaust survivor Judith Dim Evans, by saying: “Very nice weather we have been controlling.”
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Judith, who passed away this summer, politely engages with him. But her daughter is now suing Sacha, saying he interviewed Judith “under false pretences with the intent of appropriating her likeness”.
He argues the anti-Semitic scenes make people “let down their guard and reveal what they actually believe, including their prejudice”.
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I suspect that won’t be the only lawsuit Sacha sees this year.
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