Sacha Baron Cohen returns with Borat to face Donald Trump

Borat uses the flower bed in front of the Trump International Hotel on New York's Columbus Circle as a men's room.

Baron Cohen plays the cello and plans to take some Zoom classes with the teachers.

Borat has his teenage daughter in a cage. (“Is it prettier than Melania's cage?” she wonders.) And when she takes her shopping for clothes, she asks the saleswoman to direct her to the “No means Yes” section.

Once dreaming of being a chef, Baron Cohen loves to cook for his family.

Borat buys a chocolate cake and asks the saleswoman behind the counter to write. "Jews will not replace us" in icing, with smiley face.

Sacha Baron Cohen is an observant, Hebrew-speaking Jew who works with the Anti-Defamation League on "Stop Hate for Profit," a campaign to stop the bile on social media.

Borat sings a song about the Wuhan flu and about tearing apart journalists "like the Saudis do."

Sacha Baron Cohen is zoomed in for an interview, wearing a black baseball cap, black T-shirt, and a shade of COVID.

We talked about everything for two hours, from his Borat sequel, to falling in love with his wife, actress Isla Fisher, to preparing to play Abbie Hoffman in Aaron Sorkin's new Netflix movie, The trial of the Chicago 7, and how he decided to call Mark Zuckerberg and the Silicon Six.

If you think the comedian could never do anything crazier than get Dick Cheney to sign a scuba kit for him in his 2018 series Who Is America?, think again. There's a scene with a top adviser to President Donald Trump in Borat Subsequent Movie Film: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (opening Friday, October 23 on Amazon) that will blow your mind .

They say that Trump destroyed the satire. But Baron Cohen shows that this is not the case.

I've been following his work, and insisting for an interview, since he first arrived in the United States, posing as Ali G, an aspiring British rapper, and ripping off unsuspecting dignitaries in interviews.

He asked a puzzled James A. Baker III why he used carrots and sticks in international diplomacy. What if a country didn't like carrots? And if its inhabitants preferred another vegetable?

In 2003, Ali G talked to Trump about investing in an ice cream mitt that would keep his hand from getting sticky.

Trump, who left the interview disgusted, later told me: "I thought he was severely mentally handicapped. It was a complete hoax. But my daughter Ivanka saw it and thought it was hilarious."

Baron Cohen, who turned 49 last week, said: "Obviously, I realized that I have a long-standing dislike for the president. That's why I wanted to interview him as Ali G." He added: "His brilliance of him was to appropriate the very term that was used against him, 'fake news,' and use it against every journalist who had journalistic integrity."

The prankster has no problem dashing out of a luxury New York hotel and running down the street in lacy pink lingerie. But out of character, he is very reserved, even a little shy.

He refused for many years to give interviews as himself. He occasionally spoke like his characters. He used to let criticism go unchallenged, such as when journalists wondered if Ali G was following in the Al Jolson tradition and when Abe Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, criticized Borat, fearing that the character incited anti-Semitism because some people they might lose the irony.

After the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a horrified Baron Cohen approached ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt, who persuaded the star to give the keynote address at the ADL conference last year , Never Is Now.

"I was really impressed with his intelligence," Greenblatt said. "These themes are at the core of his motivation for his unique style of art. More than anyone in public life today, he exposes prejudice - whether it's anti-Semitism, homophobia or racism - for what it is, shameful and heartbreaking and ignorant. " (In fact, Baron Cohen used Hebrew and some Polish as a substitute for the Kazakh language in Borat.)

The actor began his speech by saying that, to be clear, "when I say 'racism, hate and bigotry,' I don't mean Stephen Miller's labradoodle names." He later noted that while his stunts could be "juvenile" and "childish", at least some of them were intended for people to reveal what he truly believed, as "when Borat was able to get an entire Arizona bar singing' Throw the Jew down the well,' revealed the people's indifference to anti-Semitism."

Defending the cloud overlords, he said Facebook would run and microtarget any "political" ad anyone wanted, even if it was a lie. "If Facebook had existed in the 1930s," he said, "it would have allowed Hitler to put 30-second ads on his 'solution' to the 'Jewish problem'."

The speech catalyzed the "Stop Hate for Profit" campaign, with a coalition of civil rights groups and Baron Cohen sparring with celebrities. Making the speech was "completely out of my comfort zone," he said, because "I've always been reluctant to be a celebrity and I've always been wary of using my fame to push any political point of view, really."

And he added: "it was the first time that I gave a big speech in my own voice, although I felt that I had to sound the alarm and say that democracy is in danger this year."

"I felt like, even if it was going to destroy my career and people were coming to me and saying, 'Shut up, the last thing we need is another celebrity telling us what to do' (I completely understand people who do that), I felt like I needed to do it to live with myself."

Fitting In With Conspiracy Theorists

Baron Cohen began studying anti-Semitism at Cambridge University, when he wrote his thesis on "the black-Jewish alliance" and identity politics in the movement civil rights. So he was set to play roguish Abbie Hoffman in The Chicago 7.

"Essentially, I was trying to be a comedian," Baron Cohen said of Hoffman, who was a founder of the Yippies and preached flower power. "He was very influenced by Lenny Bruce and realized that if he could make people laugh, he could get them to commit to the cause."

Although he calls himself "this comedian who's dabbled in acting a bit over the years," Baron Cohen is actually, like all great clowns - yes, he went to clown school, L' Ecole Philippe Gaulier- able to easily switch from light to dark.

(And he's got a terrific singing voice, which he showed off in Sweeney Todd, Les Miserables, and at David Geffen's 75th birthday party, when he sang If I Were a Rich Man from Fiddler on the Roof and got rid of the billionaires and millionaires in the room who made up "the third largest economy in the world").

Sorkin, who wrote and directed the film The Chicago Trial, said the day Baron Cohen filmed his scene on the witness stand reminded him of the day Jack Nicholson filmed his courtroom scene, in A Matter of Honor, noting, "Everyone wanted to watch; 120 extras didn't care that the camera wasn't on them, they stayed to watch."

Baron Cohen has been compared to a Tocqueville bawdy, and said he saw a big change in American society from the time he came out to shoot Borat 15 years ago, until he made the sequel.

"In 2005, you needed a character like Borat who was misogynistic, racist and anti-Semitic to get people to reveal their inner biases," he said. "Now those internal prejudices are evident. Racists are proud to be racists." When the president is "an open racist, an open fascist," he said, "it allows the rest of society to change their dialogue as well."

"My goal here was not to expose racism and anti-Semitism," he said of the sequel. "The goal is to make people laugh, but we reveal the dangerous slide into authoritarianism."

He wondered if the United States, under a second term for Trump, would "become a democracy in name only, similar to a Turkish democracy or a Russian democracy."

He said he moved in with two conspiracy theorists for a few days for the new Borat to show "that they're just ordinary people and they're good people, just fed this diet of lies." They are completely different than politicians who are motivated by their own power, who realized that they can create fear by spreading these lies through the most effective propaganda machine ever": social media platforms.

He had thought the most satirical moment was when he fell asleep as Ali G, after drinking in Mississippi with two old southern gentlemen, and somehow, to the astonishment of his terrified director, woke up in character.

But in the new Borat, filmed in part during the pandemic, he said "the hardest thing I had to do was live in character for five days in this lockdown house. I'd wake up, have breakfast, have lunch, have dinner, leave to sleep like Borat when I lived in a house with these two conspiracy theorists. You can't have a moment out of character."

Also a high degree of difficulty: a scene where he snuck into a Mike Pence speech at a Conservative Political Action Conference this year. He was dressed as Trump and was carrying the actress who played her daughter on his shoulder as a gift from Kazakhstan to "deputy prime minister" Mike Pence.

"Obviously, I'm wearing a fat suit," said the comedian. "How do I get in and how do I get out?" Security was there to "check everyone who passed by. Keep in mind I spent five hours in makeup that morning with the prosthetics team changing my face to Trump's. This fat suit is huge. It's a fat suit that turns my waist on Trump's, because we had estimated that it was the most realistic. When a security guard's wand began to go off, he improvised that it was from his defibrillator.

"Then I ended up hiding in the bathroom, listening to conservative men go to the bathroom for five hours until I stormed into the room. We were surrounded by Secret Service, police and internal security."

He said that when he introduced Borat to streaming services, many were concerned about political content and the idea of ​​introducing it before the election.

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But the comedian was determined to run it before Election Day (in the US it's November 3rd), because "we wanted it to be a reminder to women of who they vote for and who they don't vote for." If you're a woman and you don't vote against this guy, then you know what you're doing for your gender."

The B-list

I wonder if, with all the scenes of his narrow escapes, of armed madmen, diving into traps and vans, carrying a clipboard in case he needed to protect himself from bullets , his wife sometimes tells him that his job is too dangerous.

"If there's something dangerous I'm going to do, I don't tell him until it's done," he said. "I made a mistake with her. One time she came on set just for fun. On set it means coming to the minivan, which was taking me when we were filming 'Bruno.' And it ended up being a police chase. I was in a separate car and the The police were trying to find me. She found it all very disturbing, and she never came back on set again."

He got a sneak peek at Trump's penchant for revenge. Making a joke at the 2012 Oscars, dressed as his character in the movie The Dictator, he sprinkled Kim Jong Il's cremation "ashes"—really just flour—onto Ryan Seacrest's tuxedo. Trump, who used to spend an incredible amount of time gossiping about celebrities, went berserk, tweeting and making a YouTube video about the rudeness of the joke.

The realtor said the Seacrest security guard should have "hit" and "punched" Baron Cohen "in the face so many times, he wouldn't have known what happened." He said that the comedian should have ended up in the hospital.

Recalling the bizarre incident, Baron Cohen said: "I remember my late father watching Trump on the 2016 campaign. I asked him, 'What do you think of him?' He said, 'Two things. He's extremely entertaining. Much more entertaining than Hillary. Two, he's a fascist." My father was born in 1932. He had seen fascists in the streets, Mosley's Blackshirts beating up Jews. And he knew what fascism was."

Sacha's Jewish grandmother, Liesel, a dancer, fled Germany in 1936. She lived in Israel and worked as a fitness instructor. Baron Cohen filmed her lessons for a video: Exercise for Those Over 60, and sent her a bouquet of flowers every week until her death. His mother also worked at the gym.

He said that his father, a native of Wales, a Fleet Street editor for a newspaper called New Middle East, before going into the clothing business, sat with him at the kitchen table, when he was still living at home. , to edit his first screenplay for Ali G.

"He says, 'This is so much fun, Sach,'" the son recalled, lighting up as he talked about his father. "He was very supportive and a gutsy, gutsy, hysterically funny man. I'm sure he would have rather done what I do than sit as a bookkeeper in a small menswear business."

The business, Baron Cohen said, laughing, "was so dowdy that a lot of the brands would pull their clothes out of my dad's shop when they wanted to get back in style."

Gerald Baron Cohen lived to see his son's success. I met the parents at a Vanity Fair Oscar party once, and they were the happiest people at that party, where stars often wander around bored or resigned. The father wore a jaunty hat and beamed with pride when I asked about his son.

"It's very funny," said young Baron Cohen, when I reminded him of the encounter. "You can only do this if you feel loved and safe and don't feel judged. They loved that it was naughty, it was funny, and it was embarrassing among their friends."

She said her father grew up poor, but her parents worked hard so their three children had a good high school. Sacha did well in her exams and in her interview at Cambridge for a coveted position to study history.

When unemployed, the 6-foot-1 Baron Cohen briefly worked as a model. "Believe it or not," he said, a little embarrassed, "I did a little job during a time when they didn't want models that looked like models."

He also tried to be a chef. "I finished high school and there was a chef named Raymond Blanc who got a Michelin star," he said. "I went to his restaurant, called Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, and asked to work there, but he refused. He said I was too tall to work in the kitchen, and then I gave up on my dream."

"Recently, I was lucky enough to work in the kitchen at Le Bernardin in New York. I ran into Eric Ripert and told him I wanted to be a chef and he said, 'Come here.' It was amazing, because my brother and I we spent three hours in the kitchen during their dinner service. It's incredibly exhausting and we were in the middle of it. I felt really bad about that." Fisher, a modern-day Carole Lombard who converted to Judaism for Baron Cohen, said it's hard to shame him.

"Listen, I'm embarrassed," he said, but "when I get into character, I completely immerse myself in it to the point of almost being in character."

Baron Cohen believes, as Abbie Hoffman said, that "sacred cows make the tastiest burger."

In Who is America?, she satirized the left with a character who is a professor of gender and women's studies at Reed College. The professor believes that "the most dangerous chemical weapon in the world is testosterone" and refers to "President Hillary Clinton." He rides a bicycle and wears an NPR T-shirt and a pink hat and says things like: "In our yurt, we try to challenge gender stereotypes. My son, Harvey Milk, can't pee standing up. And our daughter, Malala, is forced to urinate standing up."

Baron Cohen explained that his goal was "to also challenge and mock the absurdity of the extreme left", blaming "the ineffectiveness of extreme leftists who are unable to ask a simple question because there are so many qualifications before each sentence so they don't offend anyone."

Other comedians speak in awe of his work, particularly skits that mock the left-wing that surely hurt their prospects of winning awards in Hollywood.

If you wrote a list of what constitutes excellence, Bill Maher said, it would be personified by Baron Cohen.

"Originality, courage, degree of difficulty, laugh out loud," said Maher. "The thing that makes people reveal themselves, and in doing so, about the country, is amazing. He's a genius in a league of his own."

I ask Baron Cohen how two A-list stars, who have three kids, make it work.

"Luckily, we're not A-list," he said. "I remember one time in Hollywood, trying to avoid being photographed by the paparazzi. I think I put something in front of my face as I was leaving a restaurant and this photographer yelled, 'You're just B-list! And I said to Isla, 'Oh my gosh, we're B-list! We did it! We are from list B."

He mused that "it seems strange that we're still married in Hollywood after so many years."

They met in Sydney, Australia around 2000. Was it love at first sight?

"She was hilarious," he said. "We were at a very pretentious party, and we joined in ridiculing the others at the party. She knew instantly. I don't know if she did it." Serious. "It took him about 20 years to find out."

What do you do now that you can take a breather while your two films are released?

"Well," said Baron Cohen, "I might as well try exercising again because I haven't in seven months."

Unless you count the crazy Americans on the run.

Questions to confirm or deny

-Did your father impersonate a famous chef at your wedding?

-Correct. We had a secret wedding in Paris. And the ruse was that it was my father's 70th birthday and he was a famous chef in England. That was how we avoided having photographers at the wedding. I trained him to be in character. He said his favorite dish he created was L'oeuf Scrambled.

-Your favorite Adam Sandler movie is You Don't Mess With The Zohan.

-I actually tried to get that movie, to rewrite it, to appear in it.

-In character as Ali G in 2000, you played a limo driver in Madonna's Music video.

-Correct.

-If Steve Mnuchin wasn't Treasury secretary, you think he would have produced the new Borat.

-No. I think he was one of the financiers of the first Borat.

-Most nights you spend time on Twitter while watching The Great British Baking Show on Netflix.

-Although I occasionally tweet, I don't have access to Twitter. I think I would get too mad at things and not be able to control myself. When I write a tweet, I don't have access to my account, so I need to send it to someone to post it.

-You stayed at Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston's house while doing Ali G.

-Correct.

-You're still friends with Pamela Anderson, who had a cameo in the first Borat.

-I was never friends with her. Borat was the reason she got divorced. He wrote it in his divorce papers: "Reason for divorce: Borat." He showed the movie at Ron Meyer's house with Kid Rock. He hadn't told her he was in her. He texted me after the movie and I said, "How did it come out?" And she's like, "Great, even though I'm getting divorced." I thought it was a joke but it was actually true.

-You play the cello.

-Correct. In fact, my first TV appearance was playing the cello on a show called Fanfare for Young Musicians.

Source: The New York Times

Translation: Patricia Sar

WD