Were you shocked by the way Rudy Giuliani behaved toward actor Maria Bakalova in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”? Imagine watching while it was actually happening.
The climax of the popular comedy film is a creepy hidden-camera scene showing President Donald Trump’s lawyer shoving his hand down his pants as he lies back on a bed in a hotel room with the actor, who he believes is an aspiring journalist.
On Tuesday’s episode of the Daily Beast podcast “The Last Laugh,” Jason Woliner, the film’s director, revealed just how shocked he was by the former New York City mayor’s behavior.
Woliner viewed the encounter in real time from a hidden control room while “Borat 2” star Sacha Baron Cohen was secreted in a cubby hole in the hotel room.
Woliner said he was texting with Baron Cohen, who was unable to see what was going on.
“And so I was watching the feed,” he explained. “There were hidden cameras, obviously. So we’re unable to communicate with Maria, but we’re just trying to text with Sacha to determine when is the right time to jump out.”
Woliner said that during Bakalova’s bedroom “interview,” Giuliani kept saying “shocking things about COVID and all this racist stuff about Chinese people.”
He said Giuliani didn’t suspect anything even when Baron Cohen had earlier come into the room as the boom guy and had also attempted a gag by hiding underneath a room-service cart.
“Again, Rudy didn’t discover anything weird, his radar didn’t go up,” Woliner said.
The director also noted that Giuliani didn’t come across as strange as he has in some of his recent appearances.
“You see him on TV and he looks so crazy,” Woliner said. “He was a lot more with it than I expected. He just seemed a lot sharper than we now imagine him to be. And then the interview happens and she’s talking about how nervous she is and how much she admires him.”
During that infamous scene where Giuliani is touching Bakalova’s shoulder and lower back and asks for her number, Woliner admitted that he couldn’t help but think, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
He added:
“Yeah, imagine watching that in real life, a few feet away. And then he lies down and he puts his hand down his pants. My jaw hit the floor. It was one of those moments you never forget. And that’s when we said, ‘OK, Sacha, I think it’s time to go in now.’”
Giuliani later claimed that he was just tucking in his shirt but Woliner is skeptical.
“I’ve seen a lot of people get microphones applied and removed. I’ve never seen anyone have to lie on a bed and put their hands down their pants,” he said.
You can hear Woliner’s complete breakdown of the scene in the podcast below.
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