Ali G: Who Iz I? stooge says he was in on joke but didn’t tell Sacha Baron Cohen: ‘He’s not going to punk me. I’ll trick him’

Joshua Loudermilk, a 54-year-old aspiring actor, claims he was in on the joke in Sacha Baron Cohen's new film Ali G: Who Iz I?, but didn't tell the film-maker.

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Joshua Loudermilk, one of two men apparently discredited by the new Ali G movie Ali G: Who Iz I?, has said that he was in on the joke, but that the film-makers didn’t realise this. Loudermilk, a 54-year-old aspiring actor from North Carolina, has told The Guardian he recognised star Sacha Baron Cohen early in the shoot but continued pretending to be a hard-right Maga sympathiser prepared to defend the US border at all costs.

The movie involves Loudermilk being recruited by another Cohen character, the ex-Mossad terrorist expert Col Erran Morad, to help form a citizens’ warrior force to protect US borders, making use of his top-secret new weapon: a gun disguised as buttocks. Along with fellow recruit Michael Aboud, the chair of the El Paso county Republican party, Loudermilk joins Morad on a mission to stop the birth on US soil of the baby of a fictional South American drugs kinpin.

Loudermilk has told The Guardian he was surprised the production company did not notice social media updates he posted shortly after the shoot in which he named Cohen and expressed his excitement about the project. But rather than being upset about his involvement, Loudermilk – who recently appeared as Squire Dap in the North Carolina Town of Hudson Fall Dinner Theatre’s production of Camelot – says he welcomes the publicity boost.

He says: “I want to use this to my benefit. I would hope Sacha would read this and laugh, like: ‘Hey, you got me!’ I had so much fun creating that character. I was trying to see if I was any good at acting in comedy. And I realised: ‘Oh, I think I’m good at this.’ And that’s what I wanna do for the rest of my life.”