Sacha Baron-Cohen interviewed a white supremacist who went on to kill three people outside a Jewish community centre, the actor has revealed.
The British comedian filmed a scene with former Klu Klux Klan leader Frazier Glenn Miller - who was later sentenced to death - for his 2009 film Brüno. The footage was not included in the final cut.
Miller, from North Carolina, shot and killed three people outside Overland Park Jewish Community Centre in Kansas in April 2014. He had previously founded and run the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriots Party.
As with many involved in the film, which featured Mr Baron-Cohen playing a gay Austrian fashion reporter called Brüno, Miller did not know that the interview was intended to make fun of him.
Speaking on the US podcast “WTF” last month, Mr Baron-Cohen told host Marc Maron that in a pre-planned move, an assistant spilled a drink on him during the scene, “so I’d have to take my trousers off, and I’d have to do the rest of the interview in my G-string with this neo-Nazi guy.”
He recalled how he then asked Miller, now 75, to show him around the house, “and eventually he took me to his bedroom. I’m there in my G-string, and my boyfriend in the movie runs in and says: ‘Oh, so you guys are shtupping.’”
But the plan took a turn when Miller “got a bit angry and threatening, and tried to punch the guy playing my boyfriend. It turned violent and I ended up trying to protect the actor, who had never been in that kind of situation.”
Mr Baron-Cohen, who is also known for his roles as Ali G and Borat, said it was at this point the crew realised they were looking at “real evil. This was a bad guy. Sometimes you sense that.
“In the end, it was too extreme (to be included in the film). When you get someone too full of hate, you get uncomfortable in the room and uncomfortable watching it on screen.”
He quipped: “His whole place was full of machine guns and ammunition. You know someone’s pretty extreme if they’ve got ammunition in their kitchen.”
The clip also included Miller telling the comedian that “all the problems of white people pale in comparison to the problems of the Jewish menace.”
A New York audience was showed the eight-minute interview ahead of a preview screening of the actor’s new film, titled “The Brothers Grimsby” in the US, on Tuesday.
