NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- The actress who "interviewed" Rudy Giuliani while pretending to be a TV reporter in Sacha Baron Cohen's new "Borat" movie was "nervous" about filming the scene, she said in a new interview.
Giuliani made headlines last month after a scene from the new "Borat" sequel showed him lying on a bed tucking in his shirt with his hand down his pants as Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova — who at the time was posing as a journalist conducting an interview with him — stood nearby.
The former New York City mayor called the police when he found out the interview had been staged by Baron Cohen, and later claimed the video was a "complete fabrication."
In an interview with the New York Times, 24-year-old Bakalova, who played Baron Cohen's daughter in the movie, said she was "kind of scared that something would happen" when Giuliani called the police.
"Sacha, he's my nonbiological father and he will be like that forever. So I trusted him from the beginning and I knew he would never put me in a dangerous situation," she told the outlet. "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."
Shortly before Giuliani was filmed in the compromising position on the bed, he asked for Bakalova's character's phone number and address — reinforcing the view many viewers took that his actions were inappropriate.
Rudy Giuliani in "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan"Amazon Studios
Giuliani claimed that at "no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate."
Asked whether she thought Giuliani was doing something "illicit" in the scene, Bakalova said she and Baron Cohen "want[ed] everybody to see the movie and judge for themselves."
"Movies like this are showing people's true colors," she said. "It's going to show Rudy's real character."
