How Much of ‘Borat 2’ Is Real? How Borat Crashed CPAC, Staged a Cotillion, and More

In case you haven’t heard, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is now streaming on Amazon Prime. If you didn’t know that Sacha Baron Cohen secretly filmed a sequel to his hit 2006 comedy Borat this year, don’t feel bad—a good portion of the people who participated in Borat 2 didn’t realize that, either.

Like in the first Borat, much of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm features filmed interactions between Cohen and real people who don’t realize they’re in a Borat movie. This time around, Cohen had an accomplice: Bulgarian actor Maria Bakalova, who plays Borat’s 15-year-old daughter, Tutar, in the film. You’ve probably already heard all about the duo’s prank on former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, so let’s break down some of the other gags Cohen and Bakalova pulled on unsuspecting folks in Borat 2.

How much of Borat 2 is real?

While it’s hard to say with certainty how much of Borat is “real”—certainly, Borat is not a real person, and neither is Tutar—most of Cohen’s and Bakalova’s filmed interactions with characters do feature real people, and not actors, who have no idea that they are in a Borat sequel. For instance, the cotillion where Borat and Tutar perform their lewd “fertility dance,” was staged in Macon, Georgia where fathers and daughters were paid to attend an event that they knew was for a film, but had no idea it would involve a Borat prank. Publisher Will Davis detailed the experience for the Monroe County Reporter, writing, “The movie company sent us a nice email asking us to take a short online quiz as we prepared for the big show. Mostly it tested our knowledge of pop culture, asking if we could identify icons like Will Ferrell (no), Sacha Baron Cohen (no) and Mike Huckabee (yes).” When it came time for the traditional folk dance, Davis wrote, “They began dancing side by side in synch when suddenly the ‘daughter’ lifted her hoop skirt, gyrating and revealing no underwear. That’s when all of us who were sober marched to the checkout desk, demanded our phones back and hit the road.”

If you’re wondering about that disturbing interview with Instagram influencer Macy Chanel, who tells Tutar that women need to make themselves weak in order to be loved, that was, unfortunately, also real. Chanel posted on Instagram that she only learned she was in the movie this week, and though she claimed she was “in character,” she also admitted in the caption, “Yes, Cohen got me …but, kinda sad how he elicits ‘reality.'” (She has since edited the caption to remove that line.)

However, at least one scene featured a participant who was at least partially in on the joke. Deadline reported that Cohen, in a rare move, explained to Holocaust survivor Judith Dim Evans that the scene in which he spews anti-Semitic hate speech was a bit. The film is also dedicated to Evans, who died shortly after the scene was filmed. Despite all that, Evans’ estate has filed a lawsuit against Cohen for fraud, claiming she didn’t know it was satire.

Did Borat really crash a Mike Pence speech at CPAC?

Yes, Cohen really did crash the Conservative Political Action Conference back in February, though at the time his identity was not revealed. ABC News reported that “a person impersonating Donald Trump” was escorted from the premises by police after he began yelling about 10 minutes into Mike Pence’s speech. The Prince George’s County Police Department did not press charges. In an interview with the New York Times, Cohen said he was almost stopped by security when the metal detector went off, but improvised an excuse about a defibrillator. “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,” he said. “We were surrounded by Secret Service and police and internal security”

What language does Borat speak in Borat 2?

According to the New York Times, Cohen speaks a mix of Hebrew and Polish as a stand-in for Kazakh in Borat 2.

Is there really a Borat barge?

Though it does not appear in the movie, there was a giant floating Borat barge on the Hudson river on Thursday, as part of Amazon Studio’s promotion for the film.

Hey, just because there’s a pandemic doesn’t mean the marketing budget needs to go to waste!

Watch Borat Subsequent Moviefilm on Amazon Prime