Sacha Baron Cohen had to stay in character for five whole days for 'Borat 2'
Watch the trailer for Borat 2
Sacha Baron Cohen has revealed the lengths he went to in making Borat 2, including staying in character as the Kazakh reporter for five days straight.
The movie, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, finds Borat returning to the US following his trip in 2005.
But this time, it's during a pandemic, the lead up to an election, and with his daughter Sandra Jessica Parker Sagdiyev in tow, to be given as a gift to vice president Mike Pence.
One sequence of the movie was particular gruelling, however, as Cohen shacked up with conspiracy theorists during lockdown.
He told The New York Times: “The hardest thing I had to do was, I lived in character for five days in this lockdown house. 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.”
Cohen goes on to say that the US appears to have changed radically since he made the first film, with many in America now more overt in their racism, saying that with Donald Trump being 'an overt racist, an over fascist' meaning that 'it allows the rest of society to change their dialogue, too'.
Read more: Cohen unrecognisable in first look at Trial of the Chicago 7
“In 2005, you needed a character like Borat who was misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic to get people to reveal their inner prejudices,” he went on. “Now those inner prejudices are overt. Racists are proud of being racists. My aim here was not to expose racism and anti-Semitism. The aim is to make people laugh, but we reveal the dangerous slide to authoritarianism.”
The existence of the movie only emerged last month, after he was spotted filming in a van in Los Angeles, with the footage then being posted to TikTok.
Read more: Sacha Baron Cohen pranked Rudi Giuliani
Prior to that, he'd managed to keep the entire shoot a secret, though some footage of him at a far-right militia rally emerged over the summer.
Amazon has snagged the film, and will release it on 23 October.
