For the second time, British actor and comic Sacha Baron Cohen has used Georgia as a source of jokes.
Two years ago, for a Showtime show, Baron Cohen convinced a Georgia lawmaker Rep. Jason Spencer to scream racial epithets and pull his pants down on camera while posing as an Israeli counter-terrorism expert.
In the latest film “Borat 2,” scheduled to be released Oct. 23 on Amazon Prime, Baron Cohen posed as an Eastern European father to prank Macon residents who attended a fake cotillion at Hay House earlier this year.
Will Davis, publisher of the Monroe County Reporter, did a first-person piece called “Hay House Mayhem” about attending the party in February just before the pandemic began, aware it was for a movie but having no clue it was a “Borat” prank film. In fact, he and his 18-year-old daughter were given a pop-culture test in which they did not recognize Cohen.
“The company would pay fathers and daughters $50 apiece, and all we had to do was dress up, dance a little and enjoy free cuisine and drinks at the beautiful antebellum Hay House in downtown Macon.” Davis wrote.
Davis wrote that they figured out the gist of what was happening while waiting: “Word spread around the Hay House that the storyline was that a young girl from the country of Georgia had dreamed of making her debut in the American South.”
When they met Baron Cohen’s character, Davis said he was acting oddly. “The second father was tall, had a long nose and was acting wildly all night prancing around in a long coat,” Davis wrote. “He accosted me as we waited in the presentation line and yanked out a Georgian-English dictionary and was pointing at words wildly trying to tell me something.”
Baron Cohen and his crew ended the “father-daughter” night doing what they called an Eastern European folk dance. “They began dancing side by side in synch when suddenly the ‘daughter’ lifted her hoop skirt, gyrating and revealing no underwear,” he wrote. “My precious daughter and I walked out into the cool Macon night with mouths agape wondering what had just happened.”
The film trailer also shows Borat being pulled over by Lilburn police for having a woman strapped in a seat on top of his vehicle.
