Sacha Baron Cohen and the long career of being mistaken on purpose

The career began with a method, not a face. Long before he became the most recognisable comedy export of his generation, Sacha Baron Cohen had decided that the joke he wanted to tell was about what people say when they think no one is paying attention. The characters — the streetwise Ali G, the lecherous Kazakh reporter Borat Sagdiyev, the Austrian fashion writer Brüno, the dictator of a made-up Arab state — were never really the point. They were bait. The point was what the unsuspecting interlocutor revealed about themselves once the bait had been swallowed. To make that work for two and a half decades, Baron Cohen had to disappear, again and again, into the people he had invented.

He came to that method from an unlikely room. The Hammersmith-raised son of a Welsh-Jewish father and a German-Jewish mother born in British Mandatory Palestine, he read history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and wrote his undergraduate thesis on what he called the Black–Jewish alliance in the American civil rights movement, flying to Atlanta to interview Robert Parris Moses, organiser of Freedom Summer. The undergraduate who travelled to Georgia to study the politics of coalition would, a decade later, walk into a Pentecostal church in Mississippi as Borat Sagdiyev and have the congregation pray over him. The two trips were not unrelated.

After Cambridge he studied bouffon clowning in Paris with Philippe Gaulier — a French tradition in which the performer lampoons authority from the position of the outsider — and the combination of historical seriousness and Gaulier-trained transgression became the operating principle of every character he later built. Television came first. The 11 O’Clock Show on Channel 4, where Ali G appeared as a faux-streetwise interviewer ambushing British public figures, won him the British Comedy Award for Best Male Newcomer and led to Da Ali G Show, two BAFTAs, and an HBO version that took the gag to American politicians.

Then came the film cycle that made him unavoidable. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan turned a satirical sketch into a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Brüno extended the formula to gay-panic provocation. The Dictator pulled the conceit into broader-stroke studio comedy. Around the same period he played the rival barber Pirelli in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, the French driver Jean Girard in Talladega Nights, and voiced King Julien across the Madagascar films — a parallel track of supporting work for directors who did not need him to be in disguise to use him.

The detour into straight drama is the interesting one. Martin Scorsese cast him as the Station Inspector in Hugo, where he had to play tenderness alongside menace. Tom Hooper made him Thénardier in Les Misérables — the role least likely to convince anyone he could carry a tune, played as a music-hall grotesque that was somehow both larger and more recognisably human than Borat. And then Netflix’s six-part The Spy, in which he played the Mossad agent Eli Cohen embedded in 1960s Damascus, removed comedy entirely. The performance refused the prosthetic-and-accent shield he had spent two decades building. Critics who had read him as a sketch artist suddenly had to argue with the work.

In the same awards cycle, Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 cast him as Abbie Hoffman — the Jewish radical comic, which is to say the historical figure whose vocation most closely mirrored Baron Cohen’s own. He earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The same year, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm dropped on Amazon and earned him another Oscar nomination for screenplay and a second Golden Globe lead-actor win. The character he was supposed to be retiring from kept coming back to win him things.

The public version of his life shifted after that. In April 2024 he and Isla Fisher, his wife of fourteen years and partner of twenty-three, announced their divorce; it was finalised on 13 June 2025 with a joint statement that they remained friends. In the same period Rebel Wilson’s memoir Rebel Rising alleged degrading behaviour on the 2016 set of The Brothers Grimsby; Baron Cohen’s representatives flatly denied the claims, citing extensive documentary evidence to the contrary. The two stories share little except timing, but together they marked the first sustained stretch in which he was a public figure in his own person rather than through a character.

He kept the political voice on. His 2019 ADL keynote in New York — accepting the International Leadership Award and dismantling Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook from the stage — became one of the more durable speeches given by an entertainer on platform responsibility, and the line he coined there, that freedom of speech is not freedom of reach, has outlasted every Borat scene. He has since spoken repeatedly about post-October-7 antisemitism, returning to the territory the Cambridge thesis first opened.

Ladies First, directed by Thea Sharrock from a screenplay by Cinco Paul, Natalie Krinsky and Katie Silberman, arrives on Netflix on 22 May 2026. He plays a man who wakes up in a parallel world where women hold all the power; Rosamund Pike is his structural opposite. It is the first film in which he is asked to carry an entire feature as a recognisably contemporary man, not a character. The working question of his next decade is whether the historian-bouffon can do the thing his comedy was designed to prevent: be present in the frame as himself, and let the audience see exactly who is there.

Tags: Aaron Sorkin, actors, Borat, Ladies First, Rosamund Pike, Sacha Baron Cohen, The Spy, The Trial of the Chicago 7