How Sacha Baron Cohen almost died while filming ‘Borat’
It wasn’t easy for Sacha Baron Cohen to make it across America while filming the 2006 comedy Borat. Depending on real reactions to his gonzo stunts, Cohen could have easily been reprimanded, arrested, or even killed if he wound up pranking the wrong people. Anyone who pits himself against a full crowd of gun-happy rodeo enthusiasts surely has some kind of death wish.
“I only ever really do something if I find it hysterically funny,” Cohen explained during his Reddit AMA promoting the film The Brothers Grimsby, “And I have a mental problem, which is, I don’t see the consequences of my actions. So, I will often come up with something in the writers room, with me and my colleague, and not really think through how I’ll feel when I get to the day when I have to shoot it.”
Cohen specifically brought up the infamous scene in Borat where he wrestles his overweight producer in their shared hotel room. “So, case in point, the naked fight seemed very very funny when I started talking about it in the writers room, but it got to the day, and when I was confronted with a naked 260 lb. man, who had not cleaned his asshole for 25 years, the joke suddenly did not seem very funny,” Cohen explained.
“The worst part filming Borat was the naked fight, because I had a 250 lb. man’s ass on my face, and his buttocks was so big that I couldn’t actually breathe when I was underneath there,” Cohen added during the Q+A. “So, I had about 30 seconds of air under there before I had to breathe in. And I had a signal with the director, which was when I thought I was going to pass out, I would hit the mattress three times.”
“If you look at the Borat film now, you will see that I do hit the mattress three times, and the director didn’t stop filming, which meant I was faced with this very stark choice, which was either to die, or to breathe in the rancid air from my costar’s rectum. And when I was underneath there, I decided to die,” Cohen concluded. “Luckily, my co-star moved off and I managed to finish the scene. Otherwise, that would have been a very inglorious end to my life.”
Cohen managed to survive long enough to see the release of Borat in 2006 and its sequel, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, in 2020.
