Sacha Baron Cohen names the biggest regret from his career
In the dawn of Hollywood cinema, comedians were some of the industry’s biggest stars. Stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Marx brothers were iconic critical names and magnetising figures for audiences who wanted a quick laugh from a cinema trip. Whilst similar figures may not exist to the same extent in the contemporary industry, there are indeed modern-day jesters who hold similar capabilities to captivate an audience, from the hilarity of Will Ferrell to the satirical comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen.
Arriving at the dawn of the new millennium, Cohen was a British prankster perfectly suited to a new age of comedy in which ‘hilarious’ home movies were making the rounds on shows like You’ve Been Framed and early internet-sharing sites, themselves driven by the simultaneous popularity of MTV’s Jackass. Rising to popularity with his first of many characters, Ali G, a supposedly streetwise poseur, Cohen found almost instant success, releasing Ali G Indahouse in 2002 after acclaim on the small screen.
This sparked tremendous success for Cohen, following up Ali G Indahouse with several small roles in mainstream flicks, including the animated movie Madagascar and the Hollywood comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Nothing would compare to the giant critical and commercial success of Borat in 2006, however, a film that would seize popular culture by the balls, refusing to let go for many years.
It would take Cohen three years to make a follow-up comedy, releasing Brüno in 2009, a film that mixed planned skits with real-life mockumentary filmmaking to create a silly slapstick flick. The film featured Cohen as an eccentric gay Austrian man looking for fame in America, and concluded with the actor taking part in a real-life cage match, which results in him making out with his boyfriend to a very (very) right-wing audience.
The genuinely dangerous situation wasn’t the actor’s biggest regret with the film, however. Speaking during an AMA on Reddit, Cohen replied that he did have one career regret, but it didn’t come during the making of the movie itself: “There was something that I regret not doing, which was, I was on this Australian late night talk show, and the talent booker had made a massive mistake”.
Continuing, the actor added: “He booked the Australian Prime Minister on the same talk show. I was doing Brüno, and I had a strip tease routine fully planned, including tearaway pants and this g-string. And my intention was to lap dance the Prime Minister of Australia, and stick my crotch in his face. It would have been an international incident, and probably would have got me barred from Australia. But, unfortunately, I wimped out of doing it, and eventually was also barred by his own security”.
It should go without saying that we would’ve loved to have seen Cohen’s crotch in the face of the Australian President of the time, Kevin Rudd, even if it would have caused a fair amount of international uproar.
