Sacha Baron Cohen

The Art of Extreme Infiltration

Sacha Baron Cohen isn't your typical comedian, because his goal has never been simply to get a laugh. In 1998, he appeared on British television in a yellow tracksuit and invented gibberish that exposed the condescension of the political class. That character, Ali G, put authority figures across from a man pretending to be an illiterate gangster to see how far their patience would stretch.

Looking at his time at the University of Cambridge helps explain the intellectual roots of his outrageous comedy. There he studied History and became fixated on the roots of prejudice and antisemitism. But theory fell short when he decided the best way to expose intolerance was to embody it himself.

Provocation was the only way forward.

In 2006, Borat hit movie theaters, and the entertainment industry didn't quite know how to react to a film shot without a script. Cohen traveled across the United States playing a Kazakh journalist to get ordinary citizens to confess their darkest thoughts on camera. The result was a box office hit that grossed more than $260 million worldwide.

The dramatic mask behind the tracksuit

The audience never knew where the actor ended and the character began.

After the release of Brüno in 2009, the actor decided to step away from undercover characters for a while because of the physical danger on set. During one scene filmed in Arkansas, he had to flee on a private plane to keep an angry mob from lynching him. So he began looking for projects where his face didn't have to be hidden under layers of prosthetic makeup.

In 2011, he worked under Martin Scorsese in Hugo, playing a station inspector with a stiff leg. It was one of his first steps beyond guerrilla comedy. But his real change of pace came in 2019 with the miniseries The Spy, where he brought Eli Cohen to life.

In that Netflix production, he played a Mossad agent undercover in Syria during the 1960s. He dropped the flamboyant gestures and ridiculous voices to build a character based on silence and constant tension. Critics stopped seeing him as an annoying prankster and began taking him seriously as a method actor.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2020, he took part in The Trial of the Chicago 7, directed by Aaron Sorkin. His performance as Abbie Hoffman earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Cohen drew on his real-life experience in activism and satire to bring to life a social leader who used humor as a political weapon against the American judicial system.

The cost of constant provocation

Cohen's career can't be separated from the legal battles that have followed his productions over the decades. During filming of the Borat sequel in 2020, the actor had to wear a bulletproof vest on several shooting days in Washington State. Tension during a far-right rally ran so high that his private security team had to evacuate him urgently in a van.

In 2024, he appeared in the series Disclaimer, directed by Alfonso Cuarón for Apple TV+. In this project he plays Robert, a man caught in a web of family secrets that has nothing to do with his beginnings in cable television. His name is no longer tied only to parody but to major auteur productions with million-dollar budgets.

There was no turning back.

In 2021, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him two nominations on the same night for different projects. That same year, it emerged that the production of his latest undercover film generated more than 45,000 hours of raw footage that had to be edited over fifteen months to avoid defamation lawsuits on American soil. The distribution contract for that film included a specific indemnity clause to cover possible arrests of the crew during outdoor shoots.