Maria Bakalova, the breakout star of “Borat 2,” is opening up about that controversial Rudy Giuliani scene.
In the movie, Giuliani is shown sitting for an interview in a New York hotel site with Borat’s teenage daughter, Tutar (Bakalova), and the two go into the bedroom for a post-talk drink. After Bakalova untucks Giuliani’s shirt to get his mic, he lays down on the bed and puts his hand in his pants. Soon after, Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) bursts in wearing women’s lingerie on his briefs to reveal the prank. “She’s 15, she’s too old for you,” he tells Giuliani.
In an interview with the New York Times Wednesday, the Bulgarian actress, 24, said she felt nervous during the scene.
“My heart was racing. But Sacha was like, you should be nervous in this situation. So use your nerves,” she said. “Convert them and accept them and they’re going to help you through everything.”
She also called Cohen her “guardian angel,” saying she “was confident that Sacha will save me and he will save the scene, so it’s not going to be a disaster.”
“Sacha jumped into the room quickly, because he’s been worried about me,” she added. “So, if he were late, I don’t know how things were going to go. But he came just in time.”
She also said she trusted Cohen “from the beginning.”
“I knew he would never put me in a dangerous situation. At the same time, we had a security team that was able to save us in a moment,” she said. “Maybe the scene when we were at the hotel and Rudy Giuliani called the police, I was kind of scared that something would happen. But fortunately, we escaped.”
Bakalova wouldn’t explicitly give her own interpretation of what happened with Giuliani. Instead, she encouraged viewers to decide for themselves.
“I saw everything that you saw. If you saw the movie, that’s our message,” she said. “We want everybody to see the movie and judge for themselves.”
Giuliani responded to the viral scene on Twitter calling it “a complete fabrication.” And on his radio show, Giuliani blamed the “hit job” on him obtaining a hard drive from a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden, son of President-elect Joe Biden, that allegedly documents business dealings in Ukraine.
According to Giuliani, as the electronic equipment was being taken off in the “Borat” scene, “some of it was in the back and my shirt came a little out, although my clothes were entirely on,” he explained. “I leaned back, and I tucked my shirt in, and at that point, they have this picture they take, which looks doctored, but in any event, I’m tucking my shirt in. I assure you that’s all I was doing.”
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