Cohen had infiltrated the Washington event and was performing a song called “The Wuhan Flu” when someone in the audience identified him.
According to the actor, the person who recognised him was a Black Lives Matter supporter who had entered the rally undercover amid tensions between opposing groups.
“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 said. “People started storming — or trying to storm — the stage.”
The crowd did not reach him immediately because Cohen’s production had hired the event’s security team. That arrangement, he said, delayed the confrontation long enough for his crew to begin getting him out.
“Eventually they did, and one of them pulled a gun,” Cohen recalled.
The escape vehicle did not stay secure for long
Security personnel rushed Cohen away from the stage and into an ambulance positioned nearby. The vehicle was intended to carry him out of the area, but director Jason Woliner had not yet reached it.
“The security guard said, ‘Let’s go! Go, go, go! Shut the door, let’s go!’” Cohen said. “And I see the director Jason Woliner running and he’s being chased by some of these guys with guns.”
Despite instructions to leave immediately, Cohen asked the team to wait. Woliner reached the ambulance and climbed inside, after which the vehicle was surrounded.
Cohen said he checked with a guard that its doors had been secured.
“He goes, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ At that point, one of the doors gets pulled open and they start trying to pull me out.”
The actor said he held onto the door and braced his legs against the people pulling from outside, eventually managing to force it shut.
“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.
The ambulance then drove away while being pursued by what Cohen described as “a bunch of guys”. The production had escaped the immediate confrontation, but the security problem was not over.
Cohen says he changed locations every night
Cohen said he initially hid in an Airbnb near Tacoma following the rally. His location was subsequently discovered, forcing him to move repeatedly during the final week of production.
“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,” he said.
“So that was the last kind of week of Borat 2. It was quite intense.”
The description is characteristically restrained for an episode that, by Cohen’s account, involved an armed man being physically stopped, a director fleeing pursuers and an attempted extraction from a vehicle.
Cohen had previously shared footage from the sequence on X, formerly Twitter, with the caption: “This was not the easiest movie to make.”
The rally incident was discussed after the film’s release
Cohen also spoke about the confrontation during a 2020 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, shortly after Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was released.
“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 Colbert. “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.”
The sequel, directed by Woliner and released by Amazon Studios, followed Cohen’s original 2006 Borat film. It also introduced Maria Bakalova as Borat’s daughter, a performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination.
Much of Cohen’s comedy depends on participants believing they are dealing with an eccentric stranger rather than a globally recognised performer. At the Washington rally, that illusion collapsed in public — and with considerably more than an awkward interview at stake.
The sequence remained in the finished film, preserving the performance that triggered the confrontation. Cohen’s latest account supplies the part the cameras could only partly capture: once the crowd recognised Borat, the production stopped being satire and became an escape operation.
