During an appearance on The Ellen Show, Sacha Baron Cohen peeled the curtain back a bit on Borat 2. In order to get into character as Borat as Donald Trump, Cohen went through some tremendous lengths, and you can see how it went down in the video below.
Since millions of viewers have already seen the movie, it’s hopefully fair game to now reveal some potential spoilers here via Cohen’s anecdotes–but among the most shocking and “oh wow WTF” moments in the film are when Borat quarantines in a Washington cabin with affable, Trump-supporting, QAnon devotees Jim Russell and Jerry Holleman. When Ellen asked how Cohen and the film’s producers arranged that, he explained, “They thought they were going to have a lockdown with somebody from a foreign country who didn’t really understand the virus. I spent five days living with them in character, breakfast ’til going to sleep at night. I got a little bit lost in the character.”
Cohen also talked about the lengthy, laborious effort that went into Borat interrupting Mike Pence’s CPAC speech. Cohen has talked recently about the white-knuckle improvisation required to get past security in the Trump “fat suit”–a 55-inch waistline is “what the prosthetic team said equated his size perfectly”–but some new information in this chat with Ellen is that he began make-up at 1 AM the day of shooting, and once past security, had to wait in the bathroom for five hours before bursting in, offering up his daughter Tutar, slung over his shoulder as a Kazakh gift to the vice president.
Another cool tidbit revealed in the interview is that earlier in Cohen’s career, he lived in Ellen’s guesthouse–he wrote the original Borat movie while a tenant there. For even more Borat trivia tidbits, this Reddit AMA from last week is also worth a look.
