My Borat Story Part#1 (actor’s blog)
2007
So, one day my buddy Leon from background work in Toronto called me to be a part of an upcoming television show (through the City tv studio), as Borat. I was like, whaaat?! Wow really!? Sure!
I was studying improv in Toronto at the time, but I had nothing else going on.
At first I was a little bit shocked to get such a phone call. I soon became excited that I was gonna be a part of this show. Leon asked me if I had a resume and to be prepared before I call. I called to arrange a meeting and had a short interview in person at a later date.
Shoot date
It was there that I met my sister “Natalia” and another guy playing Borat. But I found it a little strange that he was fat. This day was a lot of fun. I remember we were laughing alot and I was saying, “oh this is hilarious!” When we finally got down to focusing on the work a few minutes later, we were basically just interacting and improvising in character. I think I remember introducing my sister to the other Borat in the scene. I’m pretty sure we were filming for 2 or 3 hours with some of the crew giving us directions along the way.
With this gig I was lucky in a way that I knew Leon, and that I had practice with this character already because I was doing the impersonation on stage in a bar before that so I was ready to go. But we’ll get back to that part a bit later on. This was one of the times that I started to feel like I was getting some momentum with my acting work and that maybe, just maybe I could make something out of this if I kept going. It was also around this time that I appeared on one of Daryn Jones shows that he had at the time.
Back to Borat. I felt pretty good about it at the time and now we were just waiting to see when it was going to air. Watch the new Borat(parody) film (2018) co-starring Chris Burke here.
