Sacha Baron Cohen is reflecting on a not very nice experience he had while filming Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.
In a recent Vanity Fair video, the actor recalled an incident in which a gun was pulled on him and he was chased by an angry mob while attempting to covertly film a sequence for the 2020 sequel at a gun rally in Washington. Cohen was in the middle of performing a song called “The Wuhan Flu” at the event when an undercover protestor identified him to fellow attendees.
“There was a member of Black Lives Matter who went undercover into this crowd because there was a rivalry between these two groups and that person recognized me and went, ‘Oh! Sacha Baron Cohen. It’s Borat,’” Cohen explained. “People started storming — or trying to storm — the stage.”
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Courtesy of Amazon Studios
The Disclaimer star revealed that it took the angry crowd “a long time” to actually storm the stage because they had paid for security at the event. “Eventually they did, and one of them pulled a gun, and I was lucky enough to have a security guard that grabbed the arm of the guy and whispered in his ear, ‘It’s not worth it, buddy,’” he recalled. “Which is apparently what you do when someone’s about to shoot you.”
Cohen was then rushed off stage into an awaiting ambulance that would get him to safety. “The security guard said, ‘Let’s go! Go, go, go! Shut the door, let’s go!’” He recalled. “And I see the director Jason Woliner running and he’s being chased by some of these guys with guns.”
Despite his security team’s orders, Cohen requested that they wait for Woliner. “Jason jumps in, we close the doors, and we’re surrounded and I say to the security guard, I say, ‘The doors are closed, right? You’ve locked all the doors?’” He said. “He goes, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ At that point, one of the doors gets pulled open and they start trying to pull me out.”
Cohen had to think quickly in order to avoid getting sucked into the crowd. “Through pure physics, I grab onto the door and use my legs to push against their pulling and managed to close the door,” he said, before noting that they were “then chased by a bunch of guys” as they fled the scene.
And, he soon found out, that was only the beginning. “I was hiding out in an Airbnb nearby in Tacoma and they found out where I was and then, really, I was changing venue every night because these guys who were very connected in the area were looking for me,” Cohen said. “So that was the last kind of week of Borat 2. It was quite intense.”
Cohen previously posted a clip from the scene on his X (formerly Twitter) account, simply captioning the video, “This was not the easiest movie to make.” He also spoke about the scene while Zoom-ing into the Late Show in 2020.
“Word got out that it was me and then the [gun rally] organizers and a lot of people in the crowd got very angry,” he told host Stephen Colbert at the time. “They tried to storm the stage. Luckily for me, I had hired the security, so it took them a while to actually storm the stage.”
Watch Cohen recall the incident in the video above.
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