Name: Ali G: Who Iz I?
Director: Sacha Baron Cohen
Genre: Comedy
Released: 2026-10-23T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 89 min
Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Morgana Robinson

The key art for Ali G: Who Iz I? is a single garment. A royal-blue puffer jacket, inflated far past any practical size, swallows the man inside it; the character’s name runs across the front in white blackletter, and the whole object sits on flat yellow. What stays visible is the minimum Ali G needs in order to exist: a goatee, yellow-tinted glasses, a red beanie. Sacha Baron Cohen has always built this character from the outside in, and the campaign for his new film, the first feature he has directed himself, leads with the clothes.

The film is a hidden-camera comedy, not a conventional sequel. Shot in secret, released by Amazon MGM Studios and pitched in its trailers as a documentary about its own star, it sends Ali G, newly informed that his long-term girlfriend Julie is eight months pregnant, to America to reclaim his former glory. The second trailer adds two more disguises from Baron Cohen’s wardrobe. The studio is giving the result a single weekend in US cinemas, and between the costume and that narrow window sits a campaign asking cinema chains not to book it at all.

In practice, the cast is one man in several outfits. Baron Cohen plays Ali G, and the second trailer, as described by the Daily Beast, shows him returning as Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello and Erran Morad, two characters he built for the Showtime series Who Is America?. Borat narrates that trailer, explaining that Cohen “have made this documentary by infiltrating American society undiscovered for past two years,” by “shapeshifting, of course, into three different devils.” The only other credited lead is Morgana Robinson as Julie, a part Kellie Bright played in Ali G Indahouse. TMDB’s credits list a retired US Army general, C. Stewart Rodeheaver, appearing as himself; the rest of the people on screen, who are the real subject of a film like this, have not been named. What the casting suggests is a film in which wardrobe does the work a supporting ensemble would do elsewhere.

It is also the first time Baron Cohen has taken the director’s chair on one of his own vehicles. Each earlier film had someone else there: Mark Mylod on Ali G Indahouse in 2002, Larry Charles on Borat and Brüno, Jason Woliner on Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. The writing room, by contrast, is familiar. The screenplay is credited to Baron Cohen with Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, Dan Swimer, Dan Mazer and Keisha Zollar, and Hines, Baynham and Mazer shared the screenplay credit on Borat. The film comes from his company Four by Two Films with Working Title. Taking the director credit on the character he started with reads less like a change of method than a claim of authorship over it.

The pregnancy is the scripted spine on which the unscripted material hangs. According to SlashFilm’s account of the first trailer, Ali G sits through doctors’ visits and a birthing class, where he announces he plans to be an absentee father; Nerdist reports that, asked what kind of father he wants to be, he answers “absent.” In the same trailer he lists recent horrors as “Covid, wars, and Ed Sheeran.” Fiction Horizon reads the footage as aimed at TikTok and influencer culture. Nerdist’s summary is the most exact: the film looks “less about updating Ali G for a 2026 audience and more about putting Ali G into the world of 2026.” A character defined by arrested adolescence, pointed at fatherhood, is a sound comic engine. Whether a disguise still works in a culture where everyone carries a camera is something no trailer can answer.

That is the first open question. The second is older. Since the first trailer arrived, the UK campaign group NewsCord has urged its supporters to email cinema chains asking them not to show the film. Its campaign page argues that “Sacha Baron Cohen retired Ali G. Amazon revived the caricature. Cinemas can refuse it,” and cites Black British comedians who called the character “an alibi for racism” in 2000. TheWrap reported that the group had sent more than 37,000 emails by late August; by mid-October the Daily Beast put the number of people who had written in at more than 55,940. The concrete results are thinner than the numbers. A reply from Picturehouse saying it had no plans to screen the film was, according to Variety as cited by TheWrap, the chain’s standard response rather than a boycott. Amazon MGM declined to comment.

Baron Cohen has answered as a comedian. Sharing the trailer on X, he wrote: “In an age where a comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back.” The second trailer hands the rebuttal to Borat: “They have been reportings that this film is racist,” he says. “We have seen it, and sadly it is not.” Neither line settles anything. The criticism concerns what the costume stands for, and a joke delivered from inside another costume does not address it. Only the film can, and beyond the premiere audience in Los Angeles nobody has seen it yet.

The release raises a separate doubt. A single weekend is an event booking, not a run: it concentrates the audience into a few days and leaves the studio’s longer plan out of the announcement. Baron Cohen has not spared the paymaster either. At the Los Angeles premiere, where he arrived in a bright yellow puffer coat with a long train, he told a Variety reporter in character that “Jeffrey Bezos came through,” and that when Bezos offered “cash money” for a documentary, he replied: “I will, so long as you’re not in it.”

Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G in a burgundy tracksuit and tinted glasses in Ali G Who Iz I (2026) — Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G in *Ali G: Who Iz I?* (2026)

Ali G: Who Iz I? is directed by Sacha Baron Cohen from a screenplay by Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, Dan Swimer, Dan Mazer and Keisha Zollar. Baron Cohen and Morgana Robinson lead the cast. It is produced by Four by Two Films with Working Title, with Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner among the executive producers, and Nami Melumad composed the score. The running time is 89 minutes, and the film is rated R in the US.

The film had its world premiere at the Hollywood Legion Theater in Los Angeles on October 14. Amazon MGM Studios releases it in US cinemas on October 23, 2026, for one weekend only, with tickets already on sale; the announcement does not say what follows. Sony handles distribution outside the US, and the film opens in UK cinemas on the same day.

Tags: Comedy, Amazon MGM Studios, Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat, Ali G, Ali G: Who Iz I?