Is there no end to Sacha Baron Cohen’s cheek? Wearing angel wings and a thong
at last week’s MTV movie awards in Los Angeles, the comedian was floating on
a wire above the audience. Suddenly he crashed down to plant his bottom in
the outraged face of Eminem, the rapper, who stormed out of the ceremony.
It turned out that Eminem was in on the prank, but not before the hilarious
video had become an instant hit on YouTube. In contriving a storm of
publicity – “Bum rap”, rejoiced the tabloids – the shrewd 37-year-old
Londoner was throwing his weight behind predictions that his new
“mockumentary”, Bruno, which opens here on July 10, will be the most
profitable British movie of the summer.
Bruno is the latest alter ego of the comic pro-vocateur who gave us Ali G, the
blinged-up wannabe gangsta from Staines, and Borat, the brash Kazakhstani
journalist. In financial terms, these grotesques are set to be eclipsed by
Baron Cohen’s gay Austrian fashion presenter, Bruno, whose antics have
already cut a swathe of outrage across middle America.
Baron Cohen may have made a pretty penny with his 2006 film Borat: Cultural
Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which
earned $260m worldwide. But Bruno, in which Baron Cohen has a lion’s share
of the profits, is expected to make around $400m (£250m).
Paul Debrabedian, who analyses box-office prospects for Hollywood studios,
predicts even greater success for Bruno, saying it could be the most
lucrative British film of all time. “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
is a family film which will earn money, but it is far more expensive, and
studios prefer profits over ticket sales these days,” he says.
The trail of mayhem left by Baron Cohen during the shooting of Bruno was
quickly posted on the internet. The buzz began in 2007 when a crowd in
Kansas, lured to a “cage fighting” event, were enraged by what turned out to
be a gay wrestling match between two fighters (one played by Baron Cohen as
Bruno) and began lobbing cans of beer.
Early last year police were called after Baron Cohen’s film crew, who claimed
to be making a documentary about Wichita airport, began stripping off their
clothes. “We were duped,” said Brad Christopher, the airport’s assistant
director.
In California, Baron Cohen’s abortive attempt in a chat show to interview
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor and governor of California fond of deriding
“girlie men”, attracted more media attention. Other celebrities, including
Harrison Ford and Paula Abdul, the American Idol judge, apparently also fell
for his duplicity.
It’s a highwire act of daring by the reclusive Cambridge graduate whose
aversion to personal publicity has led him to grant only a handful of
interviews as himself. Throughout filming and publicity periods he remains
in character - though his mask is not always a safe refuge. Once, after
“Bruno” took issue with a hotel bill, two of his crew spent 19 hours in jail.
Last week a Californian bingo-caller sued him for $25,000 (£15,600),
complaining that Bruno, dressed “in sexually revealing clothing”, hijacked
her event in a “vulgar and offensive manner”. She claims she tried to
wrestle the microphone away from him, later falling and sustaining injuries
that affect her “marital relations” with her husband.
Kazakhstan also threatened to sue him, stung by his caricature of a land where
homo-sexuals have to wear blue hats, women live in cages and the age of
consent has been raised to eight years old. However, Baron Cohen’s parody
and the government’s four-page rebuttal in The New York Times have done the
country’s tourism a power of good.
Prickly and defensive in public, Baron Cohen has proved charming and sheepish
in rare interviews. “I think that essentially I’m a private person, and to
reconcile that with being famous is a hard thing,” he told Rolling Stone
magazine in 2006. “So I’ve been trying to have my cake and eat it too - to
have my characters be famous yet still live a normal life.”
He divides his time between Los Angeles and London in the company of his
fiancée Isla Fisher, the Australian actress best known for Home and Away,
and their 18-month-old daughter Olive.
Some detect a degree of sadism in Baron Cohen’s humour, which trades on the
trusting nature of interviewees and rewards them with humiliation. Baron
Cohen claims that by posing as a bigot, he lets people “lower their guard
and expose their own prejudice”.
He attributes his strength to enter “a crowd of people who hate you” to his
“incredibly loving” parents. The youngest of three boys, Baron Cohen was
born into an Orthodox Jewish family on October 13, 1971, in Hammer-smith,
west London, to Gerald, a Welshman who owned a clothing store in Piccadilly
Circus, and Daniella, who taught her own school of movement and was born in
Israel.
His comedy tastes were formed by the age of eight, when he was enthralled by
Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in a Pink Panther movie, and later Monty
Python’s Life of Brian. However, his wit did not stand out at Haberdashers’
Aske’s school in Elstree, Hertford-shire, also attended by the future
comedians David Baddiel and Matt Lucas.
“He was always charming and funny, but never the clown,” a contemporary
recalled.
“Sacha was cooly confident, analytical and very bright, up in our year’s top
10. If you had told me that in 20 years’ time he was going to be one of the
world’s most famous comedians, I would have fallen off my chair.”
Unknown to his classmates, he was a secret break-dancer, heavily into rap.
From the age of 12, his mother would drive him and his crew to Covent
Garden, with a roll of linoleum in the back of the car. They would pull out
the lino and start dancing: “We were middle-class Jewish white boys, who
were adopting this culture, which we thought was very cool.” The seeds of
Ali G were sown.
At school, Baron Cohen began acting with Habonim Dror, a Jewish youth group,
an interest he pursued later at the Cambridge Footlights, performing in such
productions as Fiddler on the Roof. At university, he discovered a talent
for assuming other identities as a means of getting into places without
paying. He avoided the entry fee to Cambridge balls by pretending to be a
member of the band.
“He always had chutzpah - no fear in whatever scenario,” said Dan Mazer, a
fellow student who went on to write and produce with Baron Cohen.
After college, he set himself a deadline of five years in which to start
earning money from being an actor or comedian. After a stint as host on an
obscure satellite station, Baron Cohen found a mentor in Mike Toppin, a
director at London Weekend Television, who encouraged him to develop his
characters. His eureka moment came while out filming when he saw a group of
white skateboarders dressed like wannabe gangstas. Inspired, he commandeered
a passing tourist bus: “I took the microphone and I was like, ‘Yo, check
this out. I is here, and this is me bus. Booyakasha’.” Baron Cohen and his
television crew retired to a pub, where his break-dancing attracted the
attention of the police and he was thrown out.
However, on viewing Baron Cohen’s creative embellishments, the head of the
channel pulled the material. “He said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
We’re going to get sued.’ It was at that point that I knew we were doing
something that might be good.” Years later the character was named Ali G.
At the same time, Baron Cohen began honing the forerunner of Borat. This was
Alexi Krickler, a bewildered Moldavian reporter based on a doctor whom Baron
Cohen had encountered in Astrakhan. “The moment I met him, I started
laughing. I remember him saying, ‘You’re English, yes, you’re English - you
say cock, but Americans, they say cack. You say cock and they say cack.’
Within seconds, me and my friends were crying with laughter.”
However, Baron Cohen’s self-imposed deadline was running out: he was so
impoverished he sometimes had to wear Ali G’s clothes in the street. He was
living cheaply in Thailand when his agent rang, offering him an audition as
an act on The 11 O’Clock Show, Channel 4’s late-night satirical programme.
It was the springboard for Ali G.
The rest is history. Da Ali G Show began in 2000 and won the Bafta for best
comedy the following year. In 2002 came the movie Ali G Inda-house, and the
following year an American version of Baron Cohen’s television show was
exported to HBO across the Atlantic. By staying aloof, never explaining his
characters too much, he leaves people wanting more.
Yet Baron Cohen’s dilemma is that his relentless act is ultimately
self-defeating. Ali G and Borat are both buried, victims of their own
success. “It’s exhausting,” he said once, “because there’s great pressure to
be funny if you turn up somewhere as your comic character.”
Which is perhaps why he is turning to something completely different, teaming
up with Will Ferrell in a Sherlock Holmes film. What happens after that,
with no movies in prospect and no fresh characters to work on? Far from
elementary.
