SACHA Baron Cohen photo by Ruben V. Nepales
LOS ANGELES—A lap dance is one of the treats or risks (depending on how game you are) when you interview Sacha Baron Cohen and he is in character as Borat or Bruno.
In our recent encounter, Sacha came as himself, in a shiny silver three-piece suit. “Yeah, this is how I dress every day,” he joked right away, even before sitting down. “This is how I wake up. I have a three-piece pajama, as well.”
At the recent Oscars, Sacha, presented as Ali G, his wannabe rapper character, a surprise stunt he apparently pulled on the show’s producers and Academy officials.
One of his lines went this way, “How come there is no Oscra (sic) for them very hard-working little yellow people with tiny dongs? You know… the Minions.”
Needless to say, the racially tinged joke based on the stereotype that Asian men are not well-endowed stirred protests and complaints on the Internet, especially in the social media.
“Oh right, and you are going to prove us wrong!” cracked Sacha when I brought this up. “Firstly, the joke from Ali G is not about Asian men not being well-endowed. It’s about Minions having tiny c*cks. But you see, the audience thought Ali G was talking about Asian people because of their prejudices. But yeah, Minions do have tiny c*cks, and I am very happy for them to prove otherwise.”
Sacha revealed how he managed to present as Ali G despite the Academy’s strict instructions to be onstage as himself.
“I don’t know why the Academy asked me to present other than that I am actually a member of the Academy,” he began. “But after what happened last time with Ryan Seacrest (Sacha, dressed as ‘The Dictator,’ spilled the ‘ashes’ of Kim Jong-il on the TV host on the 2012 Oscars red carpet), I was very perplexed as to why they got me there.
“They got me into a room and sat me down with the producers, and they said, ‘Listen, this is what we want you to do. We want you to read this speech. It was one of these verbose introductions to the movie, ‘Room.’
“They said, ‘Will you read this?’ I said, ‘Sure. But why get me to read that?’ So I knew they wouldn’t let me do Ali G.
“So, my wife (actress Isla Fisher) and I managed to sneak in the beard, glasses and hat, and change in a bathroom right next to the stage for about 40 minutes. Luckily, Hollywood is the one place where nobody asks any questions if you disappear with a woman into a bathroom for 40 minutes.
“So, I appeared literally on the side of the stage with this beard stuck on. I stuck on the hat and said to Olivia Wilde (copresenter), ‘I am doing Ali G. Tuck my hair into the hat.’ And she obliged. She was fantastic! Then, we went out and did it.”
Asked how the Academy folks reacted to him after the stunt, Sacha answered, “The staff there were sarcastically saying, ‘Thanks a lot.’ My publicist got in a bit of trouble. I doubt that I will be invited back.”
Sacha also disclosed a little-known incident when he almost did a striptease, as Bruno, for Australia’s prime minister in 2009. “When I went to Australia, they booked me on this show called ‘Rove,’” the Cambridge-educated actor recounted. “The booker made a ‘mistake,’ because I was walking to my dressing room, then in the next dressing room, there were two bodyguards outside. I said. ‘Who is in there?’ They go, ‘The prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd.’ Not Paul (Rudd).
“I had this striptease routine. I was going to try and do a lap dance for the prime minister of Australia. I had it all planned. I got the music down, and I had trousers that ripped off and I just had a G-string.
“I came very close to lap dancing (for) the prime minister of a major country. It’s one of my great regrets.”
In Louis Leterrier’s new action-comedy, “The Brothers Grimsby,” Sacha debuts his latest screen persona, Carl “Nobby” Butcher, a sweet though dimwitted football hooligan with long, thick sideburns and a bowl-cut hairstyle.
SACHA Baron Cohen (left) and Mark Strong topbill “The Brothers Grimsby.”
Nobby’s top spy brother, Sebastian (Mark Strong), is forced to team up with him in a new assignment.
Isla, Rebel Wilson, Penelope Cruz and Ian McShane costar.
The British comedian claimed that he still had to lose the paunch he grew for the kebab-eating Nobby, but he looked fit. When it was determined that a prosthetic belly for the movie was going to be cumbersome, the London native decided to grow a real one… in six weeks.
“I went from a 32-inch waist to a 38 and a half, which I found very hard to get rid of,” he said with a laugh. “I did it (grow a big tummy) just by drinking a lot of smoothies and beer and eating a lot of chips.”
In the movie, actors playing Daniel Radcliffe and Donald Trump are accidentally infected with HIV.
On the talk that in the original script, Queen Elizabeth II was the one who contracts the virus, Sacha explained: “There were a lot of different jokes in the original script. With any joke that could be perceived as mean, you always want to make sure that the target is a deserving one.”
How did the script switch from the Queen to Daniel Radcliffe?
Sacha replied: “There was something funny once we said in the writer’s room, ‘Daniel Radcliffe.’
“I don’t know why. I think it’s that line, ‘You gave Harry Potter AIDS! You did what Voldemort failed to do in nine movies!’”
On whether they had to ask permission from Donald to portray him onscreen, Sacha remarked, “No, we didn’t get permission.”
Some actors prefer not to work with their spouses. Sacha welcomes acting with Isla, but it’s Rebel who plays his wife in “The Brothers Grimsby.”
Keeping a straight face, Sacha declared, “Because I am a method actor, I would go home with Rebel Wilson at night.
“I don’t have an orgy every day,” he deadpanned when asked about the movie’s sexual content, including a scene where he and Rebel have sex while shopping in a furniture store.
The actor has a beef with the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating policy on violence and sexual content.
“I don’t know how the Motion Picture Association gets its values, but I would urge it to reform it in that way. Because they had no problem with the extreme violence in our movie; only with just anything remotely sexual.”
Sacha’s outrageous hooligan characters contrast with his upper middle class background. As a boy, he was sent by his Orthodox Jewish family to posh boarding schools. He went on to study at Cambridge University, where he wrote a thesis on black and Jewish cultures.
But even as a kid, Sacha was already harboring an ambition to become a comedian.
“I did my first comedy sketch when I was 7 years old,” he recalled. “I wrote my first sketch and performed it in front of some people who found it completely unfunny.
“But my friend and I continued to think of things from the age of 7 and do funny voices with my brother. That was my passion.
“I went to Cambridge University because I wanted to get into the Footlights (famed amateur theatrical club), which obviously Monty Python had been in.”
“My style of comedy was different to what they sought. It was too wild. But as a result, it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because I then had to become a straight actor in Cambridge. I started doing Marlowe, Shakespeare and musicals, but I had to learn how to act. I was lucky because if I had just gone straight to the Footlights, I never would have found the reality of acting.”
The Golden Globe best actor-comedy or musical winner for “Borat” claimed that his outrageousness is “not a conscious desire for me to become more and more extreme. My aim is always to outdo myself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails.”
E-mail rvnepales_5585@yahoo.com. Follow him at https://twitter.com/nepalesruben.