Sacha Baron Cohen has pulled a lot of outrageous pranks over the past couple of decades. None have been quite as insane as the one that ends with Rudy Giuliani’s hands in his pants.
When the
trailer for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm dropped online earlier this month, it stood to reason that the climax of the
highly-anticipated sequel would involve Baron Cohen’s iconic Kazakh character attempting to deliver his daughter as a gift to Vice President Mike Pence at CPAC while dressed in an elaborate Donald Trump costume.
In fact, that scene, which got picked up by conservative media outlets all the way back in February—with no one the wiser that Baron Cohen was behind the prank—comes and goes within the first third of the new movie,
out on Amazon Prime Video this Friday.
But while Pence emerges from the film more or less unscathed, another close confidant of the president’s does not.
The following details come with a major spoiler alert for anyone who doesn’t want to know what happens. At first it seemed as though Giuliani himself may have spoiled the ending this past July when he revealed to his
favorite newspaper the
New York Post that he had
called the NYPD on Baron Cohen after the prankster comedian burst into an interview he was doing wearing what he described as a “pink transgender outfit.”
Speaking to
WABC radio that same month, Giuliani admitted that Baron Cohen was trying to capture him in a “compromising” situation. But when he was asked if he did anything that he might be “regretful” about, he replied, “I don’t think so, I’m trying to remember.”
In Giuliani’s telling, he was answering questions on camera from a female reporter when they were abruptly interrupted. “This person comes in yelling and screaming, and I thought this must be a scam or a shakedown, so I reported it to the police. He then ran away,” the former New York City mayor and current personal lawyer for President Trump said. “I only later realized it must have been Sacha Baron Cohen. I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me.”
After watching the film, it becomes abundantly clear that Baron Cohen most certainly did “get” Giuliani.
The larger premise of the consistently funny sequel, nimbly directed by Jason Woliner, is that Borat Sagdiyev must redeem himself in the eyes of his country’s premier after bringing shame on Kazakhstan with the original film. Ultimately a plan is reached to wed his teenage daughter Tutar—played brilliantly by the mostly unknown and somewhat mysterious Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova—to someone in President Trump’s inner circle.
