Borat Subsequent Moviefilm dropped just a week before the 2020 presidential election and, as you probably remember, there was no shortage of headlines related to Sacha Baron Cohen and his team pulling off two very impressive coups involving actress Maria Bakalova, who played Borat’s daughter, Tutar. The infamous Rudy Giuliani scene is, of course, the biggest score, which is why it was saved for the film’s climax. (Phrasing?) But the filmmakers pulled off an equally surprising feat by getting Bakalova into the White House, which should not be an easy thing to do, especially during a pandemic. And, yet, Jason Woliner recently revealed how the team managed to get “Tutar” into the briefing room without even taking a COVID test thanks to the very gullible conservative news outlet OAN. Via The Daily Beast:
OAN was extremely easy to hoodwink. They’re not a real news organization, they’re a propaganda organization. And so we got her into the White House with Chanel Rion, no COVID test required. And she was at a gaggle with Larry Kudlow and she was in the briefing room. And you could actually see—and I don’t think this was in the little clip that we put out—but that day, [Jared] Kushner was doing an interview on the White House lawn with Fox Business and you can just see Tutar, Borat’s daughter, wandering around in the background of the shot. And so it was one of those things we were just like, yeah, let’s send her in and see what we get out of it.
As for catching Giuliani with his hands down his pants, Woliner says that America’s Mayor had several opportunities to realize something wasn’t right during his interview with Tutar, but he never caught on until the moment when Borat burst into the room wearing lingerie. According to Woliner, Cohen kept testing the limits of how far he could go before Giuliani figured something out. As we know, Giuliani never caught wise and made it all the way bedroom, which was comedic gold for the team, so the gags ended up on the cutting room floor.
“There was actually a beat that we shot where we pushed in a room-service tray and Sacha was hiding underneath it,” Woliner said. “We were doing this kind of farcical thing where he’s trying to communicate with her again and we wound up cutting it out of the movie. Again, Rudy didn’t discover anything weird, his radar didn’t go up.”
Little did America know that Giuliani’s embarrassing moment would only be the start of his troubles as he spearheaded Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results with disastrous, and sometimes hilarious results.
(Via The Daily Beast)