Once upon a time, My Pillow founder Mike Lindell was a potential target for the “Borat 2” team.
Mike Lindell, founder of My Pillow, in a My Pillow commercial
My Pillow YouTube
“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” climaxes with the infamous interview between Maria Bakalova’s Tutar and Rudy Giuliani, but the former New York mayor was just one of several people in Donald Trump’s orbit that the “Borat 2” team considered a gotcha in the third act of the blockbuster comedy sequence. “Borat 2” co-writer and producer Anthony Hines told Variety that one of the abandoned targets for the film was My Pillow founder Mike Lindell, also known as “My Pillow Guy”. Lindell is a outspoken supporter of Trump and frequently displays advertisements for My Pillow products on Fox News.
“We had the crazy idea of doing a socially distant interview with Mike Lindell and Borat’s daughter and, as we couldn’t do it indoors, we would do it on the edge of the forest or in some type of wasteland,” revealed Hines. “There would be a mattress there with a load of MyPillow products and Borat would find Mike Lindell at the edge of the forest on a bed with his daughter. The MyPillow guy would then have to explain what the hell was going on. That was just a stupid alternative to the scene that ended up in the movie. “
While the “Borat 2” team considered Lindell along with Donald Trump Jr. and Trump himself, Giuliani remained the primary target. As Hines said, “In a kind of crazy dream world, Giuliani would be Donald Trump. But we had 20 to 30 people in the Trump universe who could have been the subject of that interview, and with the possible exception of Trump himself, Giuliani was the one we most wanted. “
Speaking to IndieWire in December, Bakalova said of Giuliani’s climax: “I was prepared from the start for a time when I would have to interact with someone of a high level. I was thrilled. We had some ideas about how this could be. You may think that he will start laughing and think that this is a joke. Or you may think he is going to start screaming. People do unpredictable things. Everything we did in the movie was totally cool and I was sure it would be safe. Sasha was in the room with me, hidden in a closet, almost two meters away from me. We also had a security team that could save me if something happened. “
“Borat Subsequent Film” is now being broadcast on Amazon Prime.
Sign up: Stay on top of the latest film and TV news! Sign up for our email newsletters here.