Sacha Baron Cohen has revealed he had to wear a bullet-proof vest during filming for the Borat sequel.
The movie sees Sacha reprising his role as fictional Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev as he interacts with real people, and found himself in a precarious situation when attending a gun rally.
Speaking on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Sacha revealed he’d had to take precautions for the scene, which sees him singing a song about coronavirus called The Wuhan Flu.
“Word got out that it was me and then the organisers and a lot of people in the crowd, got very angry,” Sacha said.
“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.”
Sacha said that an angry mob had then followed him off stage.
“It’s fairly rare. It happens occasionally,” he continued. “This was the first movie where I had to wear a bulletproof vest. One of the guys who stormed the stage went for his pistol.”
Sacha originated the character of Borat on his series Da Ali G Show.
The first Borat film, directed by Larry Charles, grossed $262 million worldwide and was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars after its release in 2006.
He filmed the sequel during the lockdown, even spending five days in character living with “two conspiracy theorists”, which he admitted was the hardest part of making the new film.
In an interview with The New York Times, he said: “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.”
The critical response to Borat 2 has so far been positive, with the film holding an 84% rating on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is streaming on Amazon Prime Video now.