“We had this crazy idea to do a socially distanced interview with Mike Lindell and Borat’s daughter, and since we couldn’t do it indoors, we’d do it in the edge of the woods or some kind of wasteland,” Hines revealed. “There would be a mattress there with a load of MyPillow products and Borat would find Mike Lindell at the edge of the woods in a bed with his daughter. The MyPillow guy would then have to explain what the hell was going on. That was just one harebrained alternative to the scene that ended up in the movie.”
While the “Borat 2” team considered Lindell along with Donald Trump Jr. and Trump himself, Giuliani remained the top target. As Hines said, “In sort of like a crazy pipe dream world, Giuliani would have been Donald Trump. But we had 20 to 30 people in the Trump universe that could have been the subject of that interview, and with the possible exception of Trump himself, Giuliani was the one we wanted the most.” Speaking to IndieWire in December, Bakalova said of the Giuliani climax: “I was prepared early on for a moment where I’d have to interact with somebody who is high-level. I’d been adrenalized. We had a few ideas about how this could go. You might think he’s going to start laughing and think this is a joke. Or you might think he’s going to start screaming. People do unpredictable things. Everything we did in the movie was completely legal, and I was sure I’d be safe. Sacha was in the room with me, hidden in a closet, like six feet away from me. We also had a security team that could save me if something happened.” Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
