![]() “I think it’s going to be impossible to have him operate in the way he used to,” Baron Cohen concedes. “It’s exhausting,” he says, “because there’s a greater pressure to be funny if you turn up somewhere as your comic character.”Īt the same time, this promotional trip could very well be Borat’s swan song: The character has been subjected to such merciless international exposure, it’s going to be hard to find anyone in the Western world who believes he’s a Kazakh reporter. He has spent nearly every day of the last month as Borat. Me first word was ‘ho.'”Īppeals Court Rejects Roy Moore's $95 Million Lawsuit Against Sacha Baron Cohen (“Let’s talk about when technology goes horribly wrong: Could there be another Nintendo 64?”) At the time, our interview resulted in answers like this one: “When me came out me mum’s poom poom bush, me immediately started crying in a junglistic riddim. I’d met Baron Cohen once before, three years ago, when he was recording his first series of Da Ali G Show for HBO, interviewing a panel of leading scientists as pseudo hip-hop youth talk-show host Ali G. I wait outside the restaurant Asiate for him to appear. Maybe even twice.Īfter the screening, Borat returns to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to shower and transform back into Sacha Baron Cohen: mild-mannered Londoner, fiancé of actress Isla Fisher ( Wedding Crashers), reluctant sometime resident of Los Angeles. If you’ve been anywhere near a television or newspaper in the last month, you know the story. It features just four actual actors (and a male porn star found to portray Borat’s teenage son, Huey Lewis) the rest of the cast consists of real people Borat encounters while traveling across the country in pursuit of Pamela Anderson – each one an unwitting actor propelling forward his Don Quixote-like quest (Anderson was in on the joke). What follows is one of the greatest comedies of the last decade and perhaps even a whole new genre of film. “But then they decided that there was just enough.” “At first, Kazakh censors wouldn’t let me release this movie because of anti-Semitism,” he tells the assemblage. Sacha Baron Cohen Drops Out of Freddie Mercury BiopicĪfter pausing for paparazzi in his usual pose – shit-eating grin, elbows pressed against his sides and two thumbs up – Borat heads into the theater and introduces Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. This man is Jason Alper, who has designed all of Baron Cohen’s costumes and will later tonight accidentally steal his shoes. “Your hair,” he mouths, as he reaches him and adjusts the tangle of black curls on his head. A shorter, shaven-headed man chases after Borat. Even when promoting his supporting role in the Will Ferrell Nascar parody, Talladega Nights, the Sacha Baron Cohen he presented to the press was still a character: typical of either a pretentious British thespian or a really stupid bystander who didn’t understand any of their questions. Since reaching star status in Britain in 1998 with his other alter ego, the gangsta jester All G, Baron Cohen has never done an interview in his home country as himself and has never done an interview this extensive anywhere. “I’m Sacha.” And with this one word – “Sacha” – he reforms me that I am being let behind the Kazakh curtain, into the mind of the man behind the buffoon, into the very private world of England’s most popular enigma, Sacha Baron Cohen. “Hi,” he says, in a deep, genteel British accent that I’ve never heard emerge from this mustachioed visage, despite having watched every minute of available footage he has recorded. He pauses at the foot of the escalator, turns to me and extends a hand. A throng of movie publicists, photographers, collaborators and assistants close in around him as he heads toward the escalators that lead up to the Walter Reade Theater, where an advance screening of his American cinematic debut is about to start. It is Halloween, the night of a thousand living Borats roaming our city streets in costumed adulation of the spurious Kazakh journalist, but this Borat is the real thing. In the past month, through a series of press stunts, interviews, news events and blanket advertising, this man has turned himself into a household name in America: Borat. Out of the front SUV a tall, awkward mustachioed man in an ill-fitting blue-gray suit emerges. Two Escalades stop in the middle of Sixty-fifth Street on the West Side of Manhattan.
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