Sacha Baron Cohen Interview: Talks Backlash and Resurrecting Ali G

Sacha Baron Cohen insists his new film, Ali G: Who Iz I?, is the last guerrilla comedy of its kind that he’ll make. He’s adamant. No more Borat. No more Bruno. No more Ali G. They’re too hard, he says, too risky. He’s tired of hoodwinking people to expose their prejudices, and he’s even more tired of the death threats that periodically follow. There are easier ways to make money in this business, and eventually his luck will run out.

The trouble with his declaration, however impassioned, is that he has been making it for years. He’d routinely say he was done before he made the 2020 Borat sequel, which, incidentally, earned two Oscar nominations, and he was even more insistent afterward. And each time he says it, he believes it to be true. He wants it to be true, he tells me. So, why are we here, I ask, discussing an Ali G revival?

“Because I’m terrified of where our society is headed, and the way I can comment on that is through my comedy,” he says. “I wanted to show the extremism on both sides of the political spectrum and the danger of virtuous violence.” There’s a level of seriousness that belies the 90-minute comedy film he’s made, which features an imbecilic white rapper who speaks in Caribbean-British slang and a contraption that shoots bullets out of one’s rear end. Recognizing this, he adds: “And obviously we wanted to make the funniest film that’s ever been made.”

His longtime collaborators have other theories about his return. Anthony “Ant” Hines, who’s been working with Baron Cohen since The 11 O’Clock Show, where the Ali G character originated, believes his pal had missed the adrenaline rush, just as he had. “It’s a visceral buzz you get from making a movie this way,” Hines says, “and nothing comes close to it.”

Dan Mazer, whose friendship with Baron Cohen dates back to secondary school in the U.K., wasn’t particularly surprised to get the call about dusting off Ali G, in part because they’ve never stopped talking about the character. In fact, whenever they got together, they’d often slip into Ali G’s voice, he says, and imagine what patently absurd things he would be saying or doing in different situations.

“I also think it’s a knowledge that Sacha is the Michael Jordan of this sort of filmmaking,” says Mazer. “And yeah, Michael Jordan went off and tried to play baseball, and you go, ‘OK, you’re a pretty good baseball player,’ but he’s not the Michael Jordan of baseball. And Sacha is the Michael Jordan of this, and to an extent, we all are. We invented this genre, and nobody else has matched what we’ve done.”

Whatever the reasoning may be, Ali G is back, rolling into theaters Oct. 23 before landing on Amazon Prime Video soon after. And like plenty else that Baron Cohen has done, it’s already prompted a full-blown meta-outrage cycle, complete with a campaign to boycott the film. With each new trailer or PR stunt posted to social media come fresh accusations of an outdated caricature and of cultural appropriation — the latter a central plot point in the film, in which Ali G’s progressive nemesis (also played by Baron Cohen) attempts to cancel him on those very grounds. Some in his camp have speculated that it’s more of a coordinated attack by pro-Palestinians who are critical of Baron Cohen’s past support of Israel. (Though he’s been quiet about Israeli politics and the conflict in Gaza in recent years, Baron Cohen is a prominent Jew who has sounded the alarm about the surge of antisemitism on social media, reportedly telling TikTok executives in 2023 that what was happening on their platform was “creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis.”)

Colton Dunn, an Emmy-winning Ali G superfan and one of three Black writers hired on the film, is aware of the cultural appropriation claims. “But we knew where we were coming from, and we dealt with it all in the movie,” he says, “and at the heart of it, Sacha and the movie want to defeat evil and hate. That’s the intention behind it.” Still, the internet has suggested the backlash has Amazon spooked. Courtenay Valenti, Amazon MGM Studios’ head of film, streaming and theatrical, offers this: “We want to be in business with exceptional storytellers who have distinctive creative visions, and Sacha is exactly that. He has always been fearless in his comedy, with a unique ability to tap into the cultural conversation in ways that are both provocative and entertaining.”

Over cappuccinos in the garden of the Chateau Marmont, Baron Cohen lets loose on the mounting backlash, his battles with studios and the $3 million day that nearly derailed his film.

In 2021, you allegedly performed as Ali G at The Comedy Store in Australia. How soon after did you explore the idea of another film, and what did those early conversations entail?

During the pandemic, our family moves to Australia, and when they lock down in Australia, you cannot leave where you are. My ex [Isla Fisher] is from Perth, so we applied to go there. She’s rejected. I find out that you have to show that there’s a financial benefit to Western Australia to be allowed in. You have to apply to the police. So I say, “Listen, I’m doing a stand-up tour. It’s going to create 300 jobs. It’s going to bring tens of millions of dollars into Western Australia.” Obviously I had no intention of doing it. But then the police accept me. We spent 14 days in lockdown, and at the end, a police car turns up, an inspector comes out, and she says, “I am in charge of your stand-up tour.”

So, you had to do a stand-up tour.

I did, and I had the police watching me. I ended up doing a 90-minute show, and what was interesting was that people really loved seeing Borat and Bruno, but when Ali G came out, there was a different response. It was as if people believed he was real. There’s going to be a lot of amateur psychology in this interview, but my observation was that because Ali G existed before I existed as a public figure — for five or six years, I didn’t give an interview [as myself] — people thought Ali was real and therefore there was this different response to him. So, I felt, “Hold on, is there a movie in this character?”

I came back to America at the end of 2021 and started talking with the team about it. We all felt Ali by himself wouldn’t be a satirical movie because he was from a bygone era — this relic from another period who’s unaware that he is deeply problematic. But what if we brought in another character, an ultraprogressive extremist [also played by Baron Cohen] who’s his rival and make it a thriller like The Fugitive? We had in our mind this line that goes, “We have a cultural appropriator on the loose,” from that famous speech in The Fugitive. That felt funny to me.

In the revisionist history of the film, you had ended Da Ali G Show because you couldn’t come to financial terms with HBO. It left me wondering if there were any conversations or interest, from either side, about doing more?

Oh, yes. HBO wanted to carry on. I said no because at that time, in Britain, I think a lot of comedians were snobs about doing multiple seasons. So, there was no expectation or desire to do 15 seasons — to do the American way. I’m very friendly with Larry David, and I’m jealous of him that he can do Curb again and again. I probably would’ve had a much easier life if I just carried on doing Da Ali G Show.

A decade ago, you said of this type of filmmaking: “It’s a young man’s game. You have to be prepared for a small amount of risk, and my philosophy was always: ‘Well, if something bad happens, I’m single and everyone’s going to be all right if I end up in hospital for two weeks.’ Now that I’m married with kids, it’s more difficult to justify.” So, did you find a way to do it differently, or did you just say, “Fuck it”?

I’m never cavalier. These movies are dangerous to make, but we try to limit the risks and keep everybody safe. But even physically, they’re incredibly demanding. So, the final scene of this film is an eight-hour continuous scene that takes place over 12 locations. It’s a continual shot. There’s gunfire in it. There’s a medical procedure. There are drones, there are explosions, and it’s taking place in the desert. On the way to shooting it, I bumped into one of the great stuntmen and he said, “You will go to hospital if you make this movie,” because I explained I’m wearing a prosthetic head in a fat suit. He said, “You’ll be so dehydrated you’ll be in hospital for two weeks.”

You hear that and think what?

That I have to fix the problem. So, I had an endurance specialist who does the Tour de France be by my side during the scene and they’re measuring my weight. I think I had 11 liters of Pedialyte. And listen, a number of people went to the hospital for dehydration, including the bodyguard. There were dangers in the scene as well. One of the people grabbed a gun and almost did something very dangerous. These really are the hardest movies to make, but I suppose I made it because I’m scared of this world of conspiracies and lies that are spread by social media and now by AI. If we don’t have these shared facts, then democracies crumble and we can’t have a tolerant society. And to make people laugh is therapy.

As I read your own quote back to you just now, you were laughing. Why?

Because I’m always surprised at my own idiocy. I’m very bad at looking into the future and imagining how I will feel. So, for example, the naked fight in Borat 1, we get to set and Ken Davitian, who’s not conventionally attractive, is naked, and he’s going to sit on my face. And I say, “I’m not going to do this!” At that point, Larry Charles, the director, said, “So why did you write it?!” I continually make these decisions that are very bad for my own health and sanity.

You are making this film in a very different moment, culturally and comedically. Do you derive some masochistic pleasure from that kind of challenge?

I’ll tell you, in the script, there was a moment where Ali G is canceled, and the way we wanted to do that was that I, Sacha, should be canceled in the real world and the idea was to use the footage of me being canceled and stick it into the movie. And we did actually get some of the second bit, but we didn’t have the money to open up the movie and put the footage in. That was the intention, though.

I’m told you get a fair number of death threats, which now come from both the left and the right. When have you decided something wasn’t worth it?

I was about to do a scene [in Borat 1] and we had a cop who had his gun on his thigh and I said, “Why is your gun on your thigh?” He goes, “Well, I need to be really fast to draw in this area.” I said, “Well, how close are you to me?” And he said, “I’ll be with you within three minutes.” I realized that was not a good thing to do, so I pulled that scene. I will never do a scene if I think I’m actually going to die.

You’ve filmed in a bulletproof vest, so you’ve clearly anticipated the possibility of being shot?

Yes, on Borat 2, there was a scene at a gun rights rally that I knew there was a risk of getting shot. But I felt it was an important film to be made.

Is there anyone who says to you, “Hey, Sacha, I know this seems noble to you, but maybe it’s not necessary”?

Yes.

Who? Your children?

I don’t talk about my children. But my brothers tell me that. And my mom and some of my team as well, because there are much easier options. I made a movie called Ladies First. I shot it in three months. It came out. A lot of people saw it [on Netflix]. And it’s as financially beneficial as making something that takes years, and there’s absolutely zero risk. There must be some masochistic nature to me, but I don’t think it’s just that. I want to give the fans who’ve been loyal for the last 28 years something that they’ve never seen before. I want to give them the most ambitious movie I’ve ever made, which is a three-character movie. [Baron Cohen also plays a former Mossad agent.] It is my version of the Avengers.

I’ve always assumed that you were like Tom Cruise, after the same adrenaline rush that he is as he jumps out of planes.

I don’t think that’s the reason I do it.

You don’t? Your collaborators seem to …

No. The first [for-hire] movie I did, Talladega Nights, I walked into my trailer and there was a bed there. I realized I’d never been in a trailer before, and I go, “Hold on, this is a paid job where I can go to sleep?!” I couldn’t comprehend how relatively easy it was, and it was great fun. But as you’ll probably deduce from this interview, I’m not very self-aware.

I don’t know that I buy that.

OK. Do I enjoy it when something works? Yes. Am I upset when something doesn’t work? Yes. So, for example, this final scene is an eight-hour continuous shot over multiple locations and no one had ever done that before. Normally we shoot a scene or two scenes a day. Here, we put probably 40 scenes together and shot them continuously. I had a variety of line producers and assistant directors refuse to schedule it. And there are 400 or so beats that must all go perfectly, because you’re dealing with real people and if anything doesn’t feel quite right, they will stop and say, “Hold on, this isn’t real.”

Of course.

So gunfire, the squibs have to go off perfectly. A medical procedure happens. That body that we use has to be believable. Then a fire breaks out during the first part of the scene. As we’re driving to the second location to kidnap somebody with these real people, I find out that location four is surrounded by fire, and it’s being evacuated, and we have to pull the scene. And each time we run it, it’s $4 million and we’re insured for $1 million, and I personally have to pay $3 million. So, we shut down production and we have a discussion, which is that it’s completely idiotic that we’re trying this.

And everyone is telling you it’s not possible?

Yes, and I’ve lost $3 million that day. Obviously it was my money, which is a very stupid idea.

But you ultimately got it?

We got it. We had some of the team that worked on the Oscars because I was like, “What is a movie or a TV show where nothing can go wrong? It’s the Oscars.” And even there, sometimes something’s going wrong! I said to them, “OK, this is the Oscars, it’s just taking place over 50 miles in 12 locations. And it has gunfire and blood.” But at the end of all of it, if you look at the behind-the-scenes footage, I’m not jumping up and down. I’m content.

With 2020’s Borat 2, you’ve said that several of the places you pitched were concerned by the political content and the idea of running it before the election. How did this pitch compare?

Well, the desire was always to have this come out a few days before either a presidential election or the midterms. A lot of my movies have come out around those times. Borat 1 came out almost 20 years to the day, on November 3, 2006, just before the midterms. It’s a time for people to think about the choices that they’re about to make. But this movie is more about the dangers of extremism on both sides.

I get that, but you’re also operating in an extremely risk-averse climate. I can’t imagine there weren’t any concerns …

Well, Hollywood is a superficial place.

Noooo.

I know. (Laughter.) But I pitched this after Borat 2 had won two Golden Globes and had Oscar nominations and was the most watched movie ever on Amazon. That’s enough to convince studio heads to buy it. And everyone tried.

It was somewhere else first, no?

Yes. Amazon and Universal were the final contenders. We ended up going with Universal but, in the end, the movie took so long that we went back to Amazon. And it was actually great because we’d had an incredible experience there with the last one. We really did. And that movie [Borat 2] also was at Universal and ended up at Amazon.

So, this one moved because —

It was taking too long. You have to understand the basis of this kind of movie is that we have to find people who don’t know who I am, which becomes harder and harder. I think our research department interviewed 5,000 doctors to get one [for a single scene]. Then we had a number of other things that kept on shutting it down. The fire. The writers strike. I ended up doing another movie in the middle.

Amazon came aboard a third of the way through. What did their notes look like?

For better or worse, maybe for worse, I’m a final-cut producer and director.

So, you’re saying it didn’t much matter what their notes were?

Well, executives can have really fantastic notes. And they can have terrible notes. But I always listen to the audience and I’m really guided by that.

You were once asked about comparisons between you and Andy Kaufman, to which you said, “In a way, he’s more of an artist than I am in that I don’t think he cared what the audience thought — and deep down, I really want to make the audience laugh. And that’s why I fight to get jokes to be funny … I’ll go to war with whatever studio has been stupid enough to pay me money to make a movie.” Again, you’re laughing …

I can’t believe how honest I was.

What did those fights look like on a film like this?

If something is funny, then I will go to war for it. And the studios know that because I make it clear when we do these movies, which makes me not very studio-friendly in some ways because my allegiance is to the audience. And I go to every single screening and I record the laughter and I grade the jokes and I have a few people that I’ve trained to grade them too, and then I cut the jokes within a frame. It’s obsessive and very intricate, but it’s designed to deliver really funny movies. Some people find me incredibly arrogant because they’ll come up and say, “You know that movie, Borat 2, wasn’t funny.” And I’ll say, “You’re entitled to your opinion, but you’re wrong. I have 5,000 people laughing at these jokes and I can show you they are empirically funny.”

You said that you’re not studio-friendly, but, as you noted, this is a superficial business and if your model can put butts in seats …

Yes, it’s about money. But I’m also a great supporter of the Oscars and other awards ceremonies because, however absurd they are, it creates another incentive for studio heads to make quality projects. Because studio heads do want to win Oscars and they want to get nominated. And we’ve been very lucky in that the Academy and the Globes and some other organizations have recognized our work.

In fact, I was sitting at that table [pointing to another table in the Chateau garden] in 2006 having done Borat, and Sean Penn came and sat at the table and he said, “Why don’t you do an Oscar campaign for your performance in Borat?” I said, “That’s absurd. They’ll never give me an Oscar nomination.” And he said, “They will.” So, we went to Fox at the time and they said, “Listen, we’ll pay for one Oscar campaign, but it’s either writing or acting.” At the time, I was actually winning some of the acting awards, to my great surprise, but I spoke to the team and we decided to push the writing. [The 2006 film was nominated for best adapted screenplay.] So, we gave up the acting campaign. Also, I was about to make Bruno and I didn’t want to go on a baby-kissing tour, which would destroy my next movie. Me doing this kind of stuff [an interview as himself] destroys the ability to make another one.

I know, I know. I’m sorry.

There we go. Look what you’ve done. You’ve ruined me.

As you anticipated, it didn’t take long for people to start lodging complaints. One criticism, which mirrors a plotline in the film, is that Ali G uses the character as a cover for enforcing racial stereotypes. What do you say to that?

Well, I’ll repeat what I’ve said for many years, which is that Ali G is a white cultural appropriator who steals from the musical artists that he admires. The reason Ali G says “West Side” is not because the Afro-Caribbean community in London was saying “West Side.” Nobody there was. It’s because Tupac Shakur, who he admires, is saying “West Side.” And so he is funny because he is delusional. He lives this boring, white middle-class life in a suburban town, and he deludes himself that he’s living in Compton, and that is the absurdity of Ali G. The core joke is that a white moron, possibly the stupidest man in the world, is interviewing a white expert or high-status politician, and that white expert or high-status politician believes that this imbecile played by me is real and that leads to comedy. And in my belief, it slightly undermines the power of the establishment. So it was fundamentally an anti-establishment character where we’re pricking the assuredness of the establishment by saying, “Listen, these people aren’t that smart. They believe that Channel 4 or HBO could have sent one of the most stupid people in the world to interview them.”

What do you make of the argument that not everybody recognizes the absurdity and so the stereotypes being presented can have dangerous ramifications?

Everyone is entitled to their own view. And a lot of the stuff on social media is orchestrated, and not necessarily orchestrated by people who really believe in what they’re saying.

We’ll get to that.

But when I did Da Ali G Show in America, the first people who gravitated to it were the Black hip-hop community. The first GQ Award that I was given was given to me by Method Man and Redman. I did a series of adverts for the NBA directed by Spike Lee, who’s not naive about racial issues. They recognized these characters, these white cultural appropriators, and they found them funny. So, this notion of it being problematic hadn’t been raised for 20 years.

OK, but you seemed to know it would be this time around?

Yes. I knew, and I wanted to make sure that this was an anti-racist movie, which is why we were so concerned with having absolutely brilliant Black writers on board and consulting with brilliant Black cultural commentators.

As I believe you were referencing, there was a pretty sizable social media campaign to boycott the movie, and some have speculated that the campaign is tied to your pro-Israel stance —

Well, I haven’t said anything about Israel. [Baron Cohen voiced his support for Israel and the hostages immediately after the Oct. 7 attacks but has been quiet on the Gaza war and Israeli politics in the years since.] I think people are being portrayed as things that they are not on social media and it’s problematic. We are in a world where people can’t distinguish between facts and lies, and that’s something that I’ve spent a lot of the last few years trying to fix. For example, I co-founded a group called Stop Hate for Profit with the NAACP and Color of Change and the ADL and certain other civil rights groups to stop the misinformation and incitement of racism on social media. So, I’m not surprised that prominent Jews are being targeted. I knew that this was going to happen. The level of organization is surprising, but this is a trend of Jews being portrayed in certain ways and trying to be silenced.

You’ve been vocal about the rise of antisemitism, broadly speaking. Have you felt any difference in your own Hollywood career after Oct. 7?

No, not really. I mean, maybe it’s because I don’t do much, but I haven’t.

Well, you’re about to make your West End debut in a Quentin Tarantino play, which feels like a big leap, going from this film, in which you’re in complete control as the writer, director and star, to being a puppet in Tarantino’s theater. How did that come together?

I’ve never had a career plan, but I have this kind of no-brainer rule, which is if one of the best directors in the world asks me to do something, I’ll say yes, even if it’s instinctively the wrong project. So when Martin Scorsese says, “I’m doing a kid’s film, will Sacha play the villain in it?” And I read the book and the character’s not that interesting. I actually had a lot of arguments with [screenwriter John] Logan about it [Hugo]. But I say yes because I want to learn how to make better films. And so if Quentin comes along and says, “I want to do a play,” I say yes. Then I actually read the play and I thought it was fantastic. And I felt, why not? So currently, I’m doing nine hours of sword-fighting training a week. And I would just clarify, rather than be a puppet, Quentin did suggest that there would be some element of collaboration.

Have you seen it yet?

A little bit, yes. But Quentin and I have been talking about doing a project for at least 20 years. We talked about doing The Scarlet Pimpernel about 20 years ago. Borat came out and Quentin and I would have dinner monthly and I almost did a part in [his 2012 Western] Django Unchained. In the end, I had to drop out because I ended up doing Les Misérables. But I came very close to doing a scene with Kerry Washington. I even had a prosthetic chin made because Quentin was very adamant that I would resemble this character he’d liked from the ’40s.

Ant Hines, one of your longtime collaborators, suggested you’ve tussled with Amazon in the promotion of this new film. “We’re giving Amazon panic attacks on the daily,” he told me. “They’re used to Timothée Chalamet eating some chicken wings; they’re not used to 300 Timothée Chalamets attempting to take part in the London Marathon, which is a thing they shut down.”

This is why it’s best not to talk to somebody like Ant. (Laughs.) You know, they’ve actually been great in terms of the marketing. But it’s not a traditional process when you work with me and you’re marketing a movie.

You did end up with 300 Ali G look-alikes following you around London. That had to be validating, if a little overwhelming.

The really concerning thing was that these fans were coming out with catchphrases that I’d completely forgotten. I was like, “Wait a minute. I recognize that … What is that from?” And they’d go, “It’s you!” And some of them were doing better Ali G impressions than me. There was one guy there, an Ali G impersonator, and I had to explain, like, “Listen, you’ve been doing this at weddings and bar mitzvahs every week for the last 20 years. I haven’t been doing this.” I’ve actually had that happen before. We did a movie called Bruno, and Jonah Hill was one of the writers. And in the writers room, he was doing impressions of Bruno, and they were better than Bruno. Then when I started shooting the movie, I realized that I was doing an impression of Jonah Hill doing an impression of me.

In any genre, there’s always an “It” person, and at various points, you’ve employed those people shortly before they reached that status: Jonah, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and, most recently, Nathan Fielder, who worked on your Showtime series, Who Is America? What do you think of what Nathan has done in the eight years since you worked together?

Oh, I think he’s a comic genius and he reinvented the genre that I, I suppose, created or developed. And he had a rule, really, which was to not do anything that I had done. But he’s a brilliant, brilliant mind, and absolutely hilarious. I think his documentary [You Can See Everything] is going to be huge, so I’m very excited for him.

But it’s been an honor to have all of these incredible people come and work with me. Seth and Evan, the story with them was, it was the Ali G Show, and they came in with an idea for Bruno — instead of Girls Gone Wild, it was Boys Gone Wild. I said, “OK, you’re hired, but I’ve only got enough money for one writer, so unless you want to share a hotel room and a bed and a wage, I can only hire one of you and it’s going to be Seth.” They came back and said, “We’ll split the wage.” And basically they would write in a double bed in the Best Western hotel we were in. They had beers all around them. They were smoking and they’d write in bed.

That’s fantastic. For you, what do the incoming calls look like these days?

I think they’re kind of what comes in to everyone. I get the traditional comedies, kernels of comedy ideas, and then dramas.

Is one genre more appealing than the other right now?

No. I want to do stuff that challenges me. So again, I’m not doing Borat 3, which also would be incredibly challenging. Again, this movie I just did is the most challenging movie I’ve ever done, but I’m not doing more.

Until the next one …

No, no, I really have had enough. I know you don’t believe me.

I do not.

Oh, I really pray that in six years’ time, you don’t come to me and quote me to myself.

This story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.