One of the most talked-about movie scenes of 2020 came in Borat 2, when Maria Bakalova’s character found herself alone in a hotel room with Rudy Giuliani. Anyone who saw Borat 2 can remember the shock and horror they felt when Giuliani laid down on the bed, and Sacha Baron Cohen appeared to arrive just in time to prevent anything further from happening.

We previously got a bit of insight into how this entire sequence was filmed and how the Borat 2 team got access to Giuliani in the first place, but Cohen recently opened up even further about the sequence to Ben Affleck of all people.

The two interviewed one another as part of Variety’s Actors on Actors series, and Affleck was incredibly curious to find out how Baron Cohen knew exactly when to jump into the hotel room. As it turns out, Baron Cohen was hiding in a secret compartment they built inside a closet, but once inside he found his means of communication was compromised:

“In that scene, we built a secret compartment inside a wardrobe for me to stand in, and it was about six foot six. I’m standing in complete darkness. I have to change into this erotic outfit to seduce Giuliani with. And the idea was that I would communicate with a mobile phone.

I switched on the cellphone. I’m in pitch black and it’s got 4%. It’s an hour-and-a-half scene. And actually, I interrupted the scene. There was one other version where room service brings in a trolley, and I’m hiding in the trolley. I never thought that he was actually going to go in the room.”

The actor and producer had to keep his actress' safety top of mind:

"I was hoping for the movie they would [go in the room]. But also, you know this as a producer and a director, I have an actress there who I need to look after and protect as well. We’re putting her in a situation with a powerful man who may or may not have been in this situation before. And then eventually I basically ran in, but I had no idea that he was on the bed."

Baron Cohen explained that while hiding, he had to keep turning the phone off and on to conserve battery power because the interview was scheduled to last an hour and a half. And at one point – when he had no idea they were in the bedroom – he turned the phone on to find four text messages from the film’s director saying “NOW! NOW! NOW!” and he burst out of the closet and rushed into the bedroom, where Rudy was laying on the bed.

A close call if there ever was one, but the full back-and-forth between Affleck and Baron Cohen is well worth a watch to see him explain in detail how this entire sequence went down.