Arguably the hardest part of filming Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was choosing which dumbass stooge in the president's orbit to dupe into doing something embarrassing on-screen. Mostly because, gosh, there's just so, so many. Obviously, anyone who has seen the film knows Sacha Baron Cohen and Co. eventually landed on noted professional shirt-tucker Rudy Giuliani, but recent interviews have revealed several alternate ideas.

In a recent chat with Variety, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm producer and co-writer Anthony Hines discussed a scrapped plan to lure Mike Lindell—Fox News regular, "My Pillow Guy", public idiot—into a one-on-one situation in the woods with Borat's daughter, Tutar (Maria Bakalova).

“We had this crazy idea to do a socially distanced interview with Mike Lindell and Borat’s daughter, and since we couldn’t do it indoors, we’d do it in the edge of the woods or some kind of wasteland,” says Anthony Hines, the producer and co-writer of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. “There would be a mattress there with a load of MyPillow products and Borat would find Mike Lindell at the edge of the woods in a bed with his daughter. The MyPillow guy would then have to explain what the hell was going on. That was just one harebrained alternative to the scene that ended up in the movie.”

According to Hines, a good portion of pre-production was basically putting together a target list, along with a "ludicrous" rough script that people reportedly told Baron Cohen was "great but...obviously impossible to make."

“In sort of like a crazy pipe dream world, Giuliani would have been Donald Trump,” says Hines. “But we had 20 to 30 people in the Trump universe that could have been the subject of that interview, and with the possible exception of Trump himself, Giuliani was the one we wanted the most.”

For more on Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, here is our deep-dive interview with director Jason Woliner.