Fourteen years after Borat crowed about his wife and launched a generation of bad impressions, Sacha Baron Cohen is bringing the character back for another round of pointed satire. As rumored for weeks and officially confirmed on Tuesday, Cohen’s sequel to Borat will debut before the presidential election via Amazon Prime Video.
Hollywood trade Deadline reported the news, and also initially claimed the release date as October 23. After the publication of its piece, however, that date was changed without notice to simply “late October.” But regardless of when it arrives, next month is sure to be busy for Cohen: On October 16, Cohen also stars as Abbie Hoffman in Aaron Sorkin’s Netflix film, The Trial of the Chicago 7.
According to Deadline, the Borat sequel was the first film to shoot during the coronavirus pandemic once filming restrictions were eased. Cohen apparently flew around the country and to international locations for the shoot. The site claimed Cohen “risked his life multiple times to shoot the scenes in this film” and even had to “wear a bulletproof vest on two different shooting days.”
Not that anyone should be surprised by the lengths Cohen went to film the Borat sequel—rumored to be called Borat: Gift of Pornographic Monkey to Vice Premier Mikhael Pence to Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan. Allegedly, it will focus on hot-button issues including the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and President Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
The comedian and satirist has made a career of putting himself into increasingly fraught situations, including this past summer. In June, Cohen crashed a right-wing rally to perform a parody song that denigrated public figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates, spoofing the politicized response to the coronavirus pandemic. The next month, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani claimed to have called the police on Cohen, who surprised the former Republican politician with a fake interview. (Cohen was apparently dressed in a bikini for that one.) Last month, video of Cohen driving around Los Angeles while dressed as Borat also surfaced. Around that same time, Collider reported the film had been shot in secret and had already screened for some industry figures.
Plans for the Borat sequel were first announced in 2007 by Rupert Murdoch after the original film became a box office smash for 20th Century Fox. In the decade since, the film studio was sold off to Disney and Cohen never made another Borat film, focusing instead on features like Bruno and his Showtime series Who Is America?—which, like Borat, placed Cohen in various disguises opposite real-life political figures and regular citizens.
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