Sacha Baron Cohen —photo by Ruben V. Nepales
(First of two parts)
LOS ANGELES—Only Sacha Baron Cohen can talk about penis jokes and a national hero at the same time.
The man who gave us irreverent comic characters—Borat, Bruno and Ali G—is playing his first dramatic lead role in Netflix’s miniseries, “The Spy.”
He portrays Eli Cohen, whose remarkable espionage work in Syria in the early 1960s made him a national hero in Israel.
Directed by Gideon Raff who cowrote with Max Perry, “The Spy” tells the story of Eli, who was a filing clerk until the Mossad hired him as a special agent to infiltrate the Syrian government.
Successfully posing as a Syrian businessman who lived for a while in Argentina, Eli managed to provide intelligence data to the Israeli Army.
In the Six-Day War, Eli’s spy work is credited for helping Israel capture the Golan Heights in two days. Eventually, the Syrian authorities found out that Eli was a spy. A military tribunal found him guilty of espionage. He was sentenced to death.
Despite appeals by prime ministers, diplomats and even Pope Paul VI, Eli was hanged in Damascus.
Among Eli’s final acts was writing a moving letter to his wife, Nadia, with whom he had three children.
Excerpts from our chat:
This was a man who loved his wife, and they were about to have a baby. Yet, he chose patriotism for his country over his private life. As a father yourself, can you fathom something like that? You have to remember the context. This is 1961, and it is 16 years after the end of World War II. Most people found out about the Holocaust. There’s a real sense of fear, terror and jeopardy.
Yeah, this is a guy who loves his wife, but putting myself into his shoes and reading a lot of the accounts of the time, there is a fear that the state (Israel) is not going to survive and that people are not going to survive. Because two out of three of them in Europe had just been destroyed.
So this guy, Eli Cohen, he is always in this dilemma of my family or my country, but in a way, they are united.
If I could put myself into his mind, I think he was justifying that, by protecting my country, I’m actually protecting my family. That they are one and the same thing.
Would you be a good spy? Obviously, you are great at impersonations, making people believe you are somebody else. I wouldn’t like to risk being tortured. But it depends on who is doing it (laughs).
Looking around the room, I won’t name anyone (laughs). But I don’t think I would be (a good spy), because I would stay in character as Ali G or Bruno, who is American.
Sacha Baron Cohen plays Israeli spy, Eli Cohen, in the miniseries, “The Spy” —NETFLIX
Did you know anything beforehand about Eli Cohen? He is considered a hero in Israel. Yes. When I was growing up, my dad told me about this story. He had a book on the shelf called “Our Man in Damascus,” which was the Eli Cohen story.
When my dad passed away a few years ago, this project came up. I read the script. There had been some movie versions that were offered to me which I never connected to.
Gideon Raff’s version was so captivating that I read the entire series script in one go.
The myth of this guy, who was like an everyman and an accountant, who ends up becoming a successful spy in modern history—you go, how does that happen? That’s a kind of superhero story.
But there’s a real-life version of it and you go, what was about this guy, who was apparently quiet and straight and was not exuberant, becomes this gregarious guy who’s throwing orgies in Damascus and becomes so much a part of the Ba’ath regime, that supposedly he was offered to become deputy defense minister. That was an amazing story for me.
You see in the Marvel stories whenever they have the prequels, of how Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man? This is a guy (Eli Cohen) who ends up saving his country.
That dilemma of the family, his wife, the people he loves versus his new life—that was something really interesting to me.
While the show has dark moments, there is that romantic exchange of love notes between Eli and his wife, Nadia. What is really interesting about Eli is that, in the real story, on his way to being executed, he stops and insists on writing a letter to his wife. And the letter, if you read it, is actually heartbreaking because it’s completely selfless. He basically says, and his whole life, his undercover life as a spy, he’s obsessed with his wife, and he still has this great love for her.
But he says, move on with your life, remarry, look after the children, keep being on good terms with my family, it’s all completely impactful, don’t ever mourn me.
And the sad thing is that actually, Nadia, his wife, never remarried, and I hope that she’s going to love this (miniseries), because it shows her late husband’s great love for her.
What really drew me to the story was that you’ve seen all these guys, James Bond and Jason Bourne, and they get women, basically have sex with them, get rid of them the next day (laughs).
They are these womanizers without any empathy for anyone they meet, which allows them to shoot people and dispose of people—men, women.
And this is a guy who is deeply human, completely relatable and that’s what makes his job so much harder.
He’s not one of these Bond or Bourne people who are almost people with Asperger’s. They’ve got almost no empathy for anyone else.
Eli Cohen is somebody who is deeply empathetic. That is what makes him good as a spy—his love and friendships actually ended up becoming real.
It became hard for him to turn in some of the people he’d lived with for years, and the fiction became reality. So that was really fascinating for me as an actor.
You have made millions of people laugh … Not in China (laughs). I’d like to see some evidence.
(Conclusion tomorrow)
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