Hello, it's me again. The TV last Friday night was a little awkward, my family all gathered around for a big night, but I had nothing. They felt like watching. They were channel hopping like crazy. But this weekend they were in for a right treat. Now we've got now TV. I can stream whatever they're in the mood for movies, dramas, comedy. There's loads to choose from.

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Hey everybody.

With the Borat sequel premiering this week, we wanted to share with you this live interview that The Daily Beast's Matt Wilstein did with Sacha Baron Cohen for his podcast The Last Laugh. Sacha shared a ton of wild stories from his career, including the time he interviewed Donald Trump as Ali G. And getting chased out of a hotel by Ben Carson's Secret Service agents who knew Ben Carson had Secret Service. He also revealed why he decided to cut Sarah Palin out of his Showtime series.

I'm curious about that, too. Who is America? And confirmed a hilarious rumor about how Borat broke up Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock's marriage. We think you are going to love this interview. If you do, please make sure to subscribe to the last laugh wherever you get your podcasts to hear Matt Wilstein interview comedians like Sarah Silverman, Ricky Gervais, Samantha Bee and so many others. This is the last laugh with Sacha Baron Cohen.

Good evening. Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming. My wife is here. She snuck in.

So, Sasha, the the first time that we all caught wind of this show was only about a week before it started airing, I think it was around July 4th last year at that point, how long had you been had working working on this show?

It being close to two years? Well, actually, so, um, yes, there was a debate as to I didn't want to do any publicity, mainly out of laziness.

And I mean, is there a purpose in it? I mean, you see this, but also because I was scared that some of the people we'd interviewed would then try and injunct the show. So if they knew about it, they'd come out and say, we're going to go to the judge and stop the show coming out.

And that happened anyway. Within that one weeks, people started coming out of the woodwork and saying, I think that I may be on this show and I want to try to get ahead of it. So how did you feel when when that started to happen?

Um, well, it was bizarre because the first person who came out thinking that they were on the show was Sarah Palin.

And I was in Morocco at the time, uh, shooting something else. And it was I mean, she was getting help. She was going around the talk shows and talking about how outrageous it was that we put her in the show and talking about, you know, saying this is disgusting. And it's on Showtime at 10:00 Sunday night. She was literally promoting she was promoting a show that she was not in.

And I was there I was there in Morocco on set, and I was had this dilemma, which was, you know, I didn't want to reveal that she wasn't in the show, and yet I did. Part of me wanted to correct her because she was spreading some misinformation, which I know is quite a popular thing to do now. And, you know, I was particularly worried because obviously Miss Palin is known for her factual accuracy. I mean, and she's got fantastic eyesight.

I mean, after all, she can see Russia from her bedroom.

So and so at that point, you already knew she wasn't in the show. So did you consider putting her on the show or was it funnier to you that she wasn't in the show and was actually out there promoting it the latter?

Yeah, I quite enjoyed that. She was I mean, she was saying that was a disgusting person that I had. She mistakenly accused me of imitating a veteran. And but the problem was, I mean, the the interview wasn't very good. So for the interviews to work, you need somebody to fully engage and answer the questions. And she sort of gave these rote answers as if she was on a presidential campaign. Yeah. Just like her candidacy for vice president.

She wasn't good enough to make the show.

So you did you did give her a credit at the very end in the last episode, I believe, as a special publicity consultant.

Inadvertant. Yes. I put in brackets unintended. Yeah. Which I enjoyed. I enjoyed that. But I did hear that you did get some pressure from Showtime to to include her because everyone was kind of waiting for this Sarah Palin moment to happen. And as the audience, we didn't know that it wasn't coming. Yes.

I mean, there was you know, Showtime put quite a lot of pressure on. They were saying, you know, everyone's talking about this, you've got to put it in. And I was saying, it's not funny, I'm not putting it in that a few days would pass and they'd say, you've got to put it in. Everyone's talking about it. But ultimately, I was not that concerned with how many people would see the show. I probably just being filmed.

It's probably it's probably made me unemployable. And I was more concerned with the quality of the show. So I didn't really want to compromise with something that was a five out of ten, you know, just to do it for the people.

Yeah. I mean, I know you're known for your incredibly high standards. I actually interviewed Larry Charles not too long ago and he was talking about his experience working with you on Borat and Bruno and basically saying that there were scenes that you would shoot and he would say it's this is brilliant. It has to be in the movie. And you were the one who said, no, not getting enough. Laughs Is that is that right?

So, yes, I'm pretty rigorous. Well, I've sort of encountered over the years is that you'll be in a writers room, you'll be around people who've actually made the movie. And we think it's fantastic. And there's a famous quote, which is I'm going to misquote it, but something like saying that an audience can be made up of imbeciles, but together they're a genius. And that's always, you know, the principle that I've used when I've showed material where if the audience laugh and you have 100 people, then it's funny and you can't you can argue and say, well, we thought it was funny.

If they're not laughing, it's not funny.

Occasionally it leads to real confusion. So sometimes there's two reasons why an audience don't laugh either. One, it's not funny, or two, you've got it wrongly. I'll give you a quick example.

It may, if I may. Yes. So on Borat, who has seen Borat, the movie.

Thank you very much. I just wanted you to cheer. I need you'd seen it. And the other films. Not that many people are saying, but anyway, that one was it. So anyway, there is a scene I have you remember where there's Borat goes to a Jewish bed and breakfast. He doesn't realize that Jewish. And at one point he realizes that Jewish and he eats some food and he's told that it's kosher. And I what I'm told it's kosher.

He spits it out. And it wasn't getting a laugh. And I was like, why is this not getting lot? That's you know, that's funny.

He's spitting it out because he thinks it's kosher. And in the end, I went there. It doesn't make any sense. So I said, you know what? We're going to go frame by frame. And we went frame by frame. And we found out that three frames before the spit and editor had stuck on a special effect, the sound effect of spitting.

So I said, all right, let's shift it, let's sync it up, sync up the three frames and let's double the sound effect. And then we put it out and it got a huge laugh. So it's interesting, you know, in comedy, some of it is about the clarity of the punch line. You know, people talk about delivery or timing, but it's really and again, I know nothing about psychology, but it seems to me that, you know, often a joke as you're heading in one direction and at the last moment, you head that way and the brain is expecting it to go that way.

And that kind of angle is the size of the laugh. This is sounding fucking boring.

You thought it was just going to be and things.

What's been up my bottom and yeah, so anyway, we call that the double revealed that basically the brain Jesus Christ, this is all I'm going to talk about. I'm talking about frames today. Yeah. Frame by frame we worked out was that the brain is hearing a noise spitting and it can't see what's going on. So the brain is so sensitive as to be aware of, you know, minuscule differences. Yeah. Wow.

Can we delete that from this segment? So let's let's let's back up a little bit. Let me talk about the set design. I know you are all set design. You're all editors, right? Yeah. Well, let's talk about. This is a room of actors. It's a tough job.

Come on. Give us some respect. So this is this is quite an acting feat for you.

In the show, you play six totally new characters with heavy prosthetics and a lot of cases.

What was that process like in every case where you're trying to say, the hell are you trying to say that in varying degrees, various theories?

What was that process like of starting from scratch and saying, OK, we're going to create all these new characters? OK, so basically what happened was after Bruno, I vowed never to make this kind of comedy again. I actually found it to my wife because it it had become so dangerous. There were a bunch of scenes where I was lucky to get away without being really badly injured. You know, you get addicted to it at the time. But at the end, it seemed like an idiotic way to make a living.

And I mean, for a year afterwards, whenever I heard a police siren and you got you know, they're there to protect you, not arrested. So then I vowed never to do that sort of comedy again. And then something happened. I called Donald Trump. I don't know if you heard of him. He got into office.

And on this, I think it was like a couple of Sunday or a couple of Saturdays in he introduced something called the Muslim ban or the immigration restriction thing or whatever they call it.

I was like, OK, I am very, very angry. I have to do something about this. And the only thing I knew how to do was actually to go undercover again. So I sent myself an acting challenge. I decided for ten weeks every week I would start the week and start writing a character and come up with a voice and a physicality and a body shape and an entire back story for that character. And then by the end of the week, I would film my full day with three real people.

And the challenge would be, could I convince these three real people that that person was real, that they were speaking to? So I did that ten weeks in a row and I didn't put any pressure on myself. I was like, you know, can I do it? You know, the characters don't have to be good if they succeed, you know, then let's decide if I want to proceed with it, with any of them.

Were there ones that that didn't succeed, that you they didn't make it in the show or that.

Yeah, they were going out in the world. And and what was the sort of reason why, one, would you think would succeed in one?

Wouldn't I think in the end some of them were just funny, you know, and it fell this time putting out a show that was just amusing. Even if some were really, really funny, it wasn't enough.

Um, I wanted the characters to to be relevant to what was going on in that last year. So characters like Billy Wayne, who's the conspiracy theorist, you know, I wanted to say something about the fact that fake news.

So you can't even use that term anymore because Trump has appropriated it despite being the biggest proponent and spread of fear, which is extremely intelligent, by the way, to to actually take, you know, the thing that you're most guilty of and use it as a weapon against other people. So these conspiracy theorists who had suddenly been elevated to the level of proper journalists and was spreading lies that had actually influenced the election, things like pizza eat this disgusting allegation that Hillary Clinton had been running a pedophile ring under a pizza parlor, which actually sounded like a good business plan for, you know, in some countries.

But, uh, so I wanted to say, you know, so he was looking into that, the idea of, you know, fake news, this misinformation, these lies that actually swung the election, then there was is unblurred. I don't know if you saw him in the mouth when I was in the most I mean, not in the Mossop.

Um, and the idea of him was to show the level of paranoia of against Muslims really. And the. Streams of Islamophobia that existed and what you could do to people when they're scared of a particular ethnic group. So could you make somebody so scared of an ethnic group that they're ready to expose their bare buttocks and charge towards somebody they believe is a terrorist with the belief that their buttocks touching them would turn the terrorist into a homosexual? And the answer, surprisingly, was yes.

I see are scared of being seen as Elmo, you know, Elmo, if your buttocks touch them, it means they have become a homosexual. Now I am going to teach you how to use your buttocks to intimidate ISIS. Oh, show me the bottle. No trousers down. OK, go, America.

Good.

One more time, but louder with America. Where would we say in the Mossad?

I mean, not in the Mossad. If you want to win, you show some skin. OK, ok. Show it to me now. Try to touch me. I'll touch you.

Touch you with my back. I'll touch you. Drop the gun or I'll touch you. You want to say.

And that particular lawmaker had to resign after that, that episode. The amazing thing. And this guy, Jason Spencer, who, you know, his claim to fame was he had threatened an African-American person in the Congress there with being drowned in a swamp nearby. So this was you know, he's not your characteristically nice guy. So in that interview, he dropped his Baltic's sorry he had not dropped his buttocks. That that was me. That was a fancy I was wearing.

They huge exposes buttocks. He'd taken up skirt photos. He screamed the N-word four times and he didn't resign. That was the amazing thing. You know, it took him 72 hours to resign. Yeah. So I think that that's indicative of the political culture that we have now with the highest office in the land. You have a man who doesn't exhibit any of the characteristics that we would associate with the president and that filters down, you know, trickles down.

And so are the politicians think, oh, I can get away with screaming the N-word, I can get away with doing anything.

I think you also deserve a little bit of credit for getting Dana Rohrabacher out of office in California. He was in the. That's very kind. The kindergarten's bit.

Dana Rohrabacher, I mean, it's interesting. There was a school shooting on the day that we shot with him and he was behind this kindergarten program of giving three year olds machine guns to defend themselves against terrorists. And he I particularly wanted to go after him because there had been an allegation by a senior Republican that the only two people to have accepted money from the Kremlin were Rupak and Trump. And in fact, Rupak supposedly actually had a codename in the Kremlin.

So he was a huge NRA guy and, you know, essentially allegedly a Russian asset. So I was very glad to have been used in the campaign. The his opponent used a clip from the show and some attack ads so that that that helped? I think so.

I was I was very honored that that was happening.

I thought I was just doing a little bit in that in that segment in particular, which I think is just one of the most powerful pieces of television that's that's come out in the past year.

You mean in the last hundred years? 100 years?

That's what I meant the last hundred years. Typo. But I thought it was really interesting that you also just chose to include the clip of Matt Gates who who won't endorse it, kind of to show that that there are people who won't just say whatever you put in front of them. Is that why you wanted to to include that? Yes. I think the you know, what we wanted to show was there's a choice, you know, so you can stay in the room and listen to a conspiracy theorist talk nonsense, or you can get up and say, I'm not putting up with this and I'm leaving.

You know, there's a choice to say, yeah, I'm going to, you know, agree with this, you know, disgraceful scheme. Or you can say, you know what, that's absurd. And I think that's what we all have to remember, you know, which is this idea of complicity. We're all complicit until we say no. You know, so that was an important thing to say. You know, Republicans do have a choice, you know, and, you know, people who support even people who support, fully support the Second Amendment also have a choice of how far they'll push it.

So we mentioned that a lot of the you know, or several of the people that you that you interview in the show did come out ahead of time and sort of break the news that they were going to be involved. One who didn't, who was definitely a big surprise when it aired in the finale was O.J. Simpson. It was a fund that there was this one last big surprise. So were you happy about that? That that was not revealed until it until it aired?

Yeah.

I mean, in the end, I, I sort of hit it in the Post's credit sequence, the O.J. Simpson's thing. So it was a little Easter egg. And the aim of the O.J. Simpson piece was that. That final episode is really about murder, not his allegedly murder. I can't say publicly his murder, but the first half of the episode is set in the women's march. And there is a kind of outright conspiracy theorists who in the end, Eramo Ride trains up to murder three liberals at the women's march.

And in the end, he agrees to actually he thinks that he he believes that he is murdered three people. And it was really interesting because this guy was, you know, rational. He was sane and but within 48 hours, I had turned him into a terrorist. And I think that goes back to the first point, which is that in a society, in a society where conspiracy theories are being spread, when people believe those conspiracy theories, they can do awful things.

So I think it was Voltaire said something about, you know, to get people to do evil things, they first have to believe evil things, something like that completely misquoted him. But this person believed that these women were members of Antifa or the people who opposed fascist groups or as they termed themselves, the old right. And he believed that they were so dangerous because he had sort of subscribe to those conspiracy theories that they had to be stopped, that they were terrorist groups.

And in fact, the president at Charlottesville had said, you know, they were equally bad people on both sides. So, you know, so my point was, if you believe the conspiracy theory, if you believe that people who stand up against some neo-Nazis in the street and demonstrate are terrorists, then it's actually logical to go out, defend your country and murder those terrorists.

So the dangerous thing is actually the spreading of these racist conspiracy theories. And it's not just Trump. Obviously, you have, you know, social media. You have the Internet, which allows, you know, the spread of those theories without any kind of checking. And obviously, then we had O.J. Simpson, the O.J. Simpson. The idea was I'd go a little cocky. This was the last thing I'd done on the show. I was like, you know, I've got a guy to get his politics out to interview the vice president.

I was like, can I get O.J. Simpson to confess to murder?

And so I thought, firstly, can I even get him in a room? It turned out it's quite easy to get him in a room. So how did you get him in the room? Well, he can't leave Vegas. And we load him with the promise of a meeting with a Arab sheik. And we said the Arab sheik is going to, you know, give you this deal that will be worth a lot of money. You know? You know, it's basically I was in the room.

Listen, I represented this Arab sheik who wants to have a hooker in the room is going to be fucking the ogre. And he wants you to tell him while he's doing it how you murdered the two of them. And he said, listen, I've got no problem with, you know, being in the room while he's, you know, having sex with the prostitute. But he said, you know, I didn't actually murder anyone. I go, listen, listen, I didn't murder my wife there, you know?

You know, she just got so depressed. She just said crawled and put herself in a body bag, put the rocks in and threw herself off the end of the yard. So to do that, I mean, I ended up training with one of the main FBI interrogators, and they have a technique for breaking down, you know, criminals and getting them to confess. So within the interview and it was quite nerve racking, I asked him about forty five times whether he had murdered anyone and he was getting increasingly frustrated at me.

And you we've got something in common. We both are. You say Ladykillers, you know, it's not what it sounds like in Italian. It translates to somebody who murders women. Like I do that. I do that either. Ha ha.

What I hate about the press is you make a one a tiny little slip and that's all they remember you for. Yeah. You're not the O.J. they touch down. You're not the O.J., the movie star. You killed those silly people and suddenly you're out. You're the murderer stuff you want to have. You want to have some cheese. No, I'm fine. When I was a jet. Should I that the knives either the knives, O.J. he's an adult, though.

I know you did an event like this with Sarah Silverman last week. I reached out to her and said, you know what? What should I ask him? And all she said was ask him to tell his Ben Carson story.

So, yes, yes, there is a little story about Ben Carson. So, you know, Dr. Ben Carson, who is in no way a token appointment. You know, he is proof that Trump loves the African-American people, because if he didn't, why would he appoint Ben Carson? It's proof. It's proof. So we managed to put Ben Carson and we were going to interview him. I was doing this character called OMG Wiz Boy, OMG, gee whiz boy, OMG.

And which itself, I'll tell you later on about the creation of that character if we have time. Um, so we book him for this hotel in DC called the Mandarin Oriental.

I think that's one way we get there and there is Secret Service everywhere. So it turns out that there is a conference there. Condoleezza Rice is there a bunch of people there and there are Secret Service throughout the building. And they estimated we had a Secret Service guy with us and he said he thought they were about 80 to 100 Secret Service. So I was like, shit, you know, I'm interviewing Big Boss and he's come up with his own Secret Service.

How do we end up, you know, how do I, you know, get him? So I had a room nearby the room I was interviewing him in, and I knew he was coming with his own Secret Service. And so I spoke to my lawyer. I said, what happens if he wants to see my ID? And he goes, well, you have to show me your ID. You know, that's illegal, not your idea.

He would arrest you. Okay, but then if I show my I.D., they'll know it's me and I won't get to interview Ben Carson and I get. All right. What about I got I've got a fake I.D. What if I give him the fake I.D.? He goes, then they will arrest you.

I go, OK, what if I bend over in the fake ID falls on the floor and he goes and they pick it up and he goes, that might be OK.

It's very crazy. So I get into the room. The Secret Service are there. They also they bend over, Ben folds down, they pick it up fine. I walk on and I get on to, you know, in front of the cameras. Ben Carson's about to walk on and he's got the press officer from the White House. Then this is the press officer that's been there for many years. And he sees who these shop that I've got that.

And he goes, why are there you guys?

What are those? I go do so Hopkins, he goes, I know what they are while they shop kin's. Here I go. Well, I'm going to unbox them with Mr. Ben Carson. And he looks at me and the guy was small and he literally gave one look to the Secret Service and Ben Carson's leg was coming in like this and literally pulled backwards. He went the other way. Then they. The rest of the Secret Service, that something is going on and so I hide in this other room, then we find out the Secret Service are coming to our room.

I sneak in and I booked another room upstairs, go to the other room. And then my again, we have this one guy whose Secret Service, he said the Secret Service know you're here. They know something's up. They don't know whether it's an attack or something's going on and they're looking for you.

And believe it or not, some of the Secret Service were dressed as housekeepers and room service. I was like the guy.

The guy said, OK, I think he's mentally ill. But we actually had some behind the scenes footage of Secret Service members coming and listening through the door. And so then these to the Secret Service are listening outside and you go, OK, we need to exit the building. So we have an escape route. Escape route is bang round the back of the building through the garbage. And this is the security guard says, don't go through the garbage.

They're there waiting for you. So I said, well, how do we get out of the building? You know, there's like 80 of these guys because all we're going to do, we're going to position the getaway car in front of the hotel. She was driving the getaway car, actually, and not my wife.

This my assistant. And so the getaway car in front of the hotel. And he said, OK, we're going to go out the through the lobby and head towards the getaway car because you've got twenty five feet from the elevator opening to the car. And I go, what about the Secret Service? There he goes. If they come towards you, I'm going to take them down.

I go where I go what. Why I go. He goes because that's what I have to do to get you into the car. So I guess surely that's illegal. Yes. No, it's not you guys. So I managed to someone came to me, actually didn't take him down but managed to get into the car. Then we got followed by a police car for about five minutes and they didn't pull us over. And so I managed to get away with that.

Wow. It's like a normal acting scene. I'm sure you guys, they did did that tip off the Secret Service to what you're up to, to did it affect other plans? So I was in D.C. for three weeks. The first person I interviewed was Bernie Sanders, and actually his team were brilliant and they felt that something was up. They didn't know what it was. They called Showtime. They couldn't get a confirmation about the show. They threatened to go to Congress and get a congressional hearing.

And so I had to live undercover for three weeks in DC because we knew that if anyone photographed me in Instagram or tweeted that I was there, that I'd be busted. So for three weeks, I didn't use my credit card. I didn't really see any daylight. And I was going in and out of a hotel room through the back entrances. And yeah. So we managed to interview about fifteen guys in DC over the next three weeks.

Did you did you try to get anyone in the Trump family on the show?

It's not easy to get Donald Trump and. No, no, no, probably not.

And I've already got him. I had him years ago with G. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. So yeah, we might as well go to that. Now, you had your initial interaction with Donald Trump was in 2003, I believe, as Ali G. So what do you remember from from that that experience? So I'd interviewed, you know, academics, Nobel Prize winners, you know, heads of the United Nations.

No one had ever kept us waiting before. He kept us waiting for an hour and a half.

And then I remember just before the interview, he shouts, Get me the mayor. And it was was Giuliani at the time, of course. And he starts screaming, I remember him walking out of pocket.

And I was really intimidated. I mean, since I've realized that actually was probably a complete ruse and he was just doing it to intimidate us. Then he comes into the room and there's this sort of very sort of Oxford educated blonde direct that we had. He thought he was the guy interviewing him.

And then I got introduced and I was there is now with that, with my main man. Big obviously itself is in there.

And he took big out the big, dumb, big, obvious self. Uh, look here, the toilets made the go eye and he looked at me and he did not want to sit down with me and he said, let's make this quick.

And so he stayed about eight minutes, which is pretty good because I was talking complete nonsense him. I was pitching him a business scheme where he would invest a hundred million dollars in making ice cream gloves, which you could wear you could wear when you were eating ice cream and he would stop the ice cream dripping onto your shirt. What does everyone like? Ice cream?

Yeah, he does he do it drips, we keep the woe is me, there he goes, dripping ice cream.

Well, that is a fucking brilliant idea is that. No, no, no, it's the ice cream glove. I got some business.

I did I would just want to tell you about and I'll be a fool if very quickly, what is the most popular thing in the world? Music. No, tell me ice cream. OK, everyone has it. And what is the problem with ice cream?

I have no idea. It drips.

OK, so me I d want to make a drip proof ice cream.

Now put it this way. If you ain't going to come out with that. No, no. I promise you I want me.

I be is to come out with just like these ice cream gloves that make the ice cream not go in your hands and make it all well sticky and also keep your hands warm when when you see in OK is your window is doing OK.

Well, it sounds like a good idea and I hope you make a lot of money. Good luck, folks. It's been nice seeing you. Take care of yourself, OK? You're going to be in on that. Well, it sounds like an interest we got that Diddy is going to be it good.

And basically during the interview I asked him because later on he came out because I was the one person I was the one person who saw through this.

You know, I got out immediately and got my question is, if he saw that it was fake, why would he have claimed, as he did, that human beings have been trading in rocks for millions of years?

Because I asked him, I go, you know, how long has people been doing business? And he said, well, human beings have been trading in rocks for millions of years now. The actual answer is human beings have been trading insults somewhere between kind of, you know, three to ten thousand years. It was a foolish thing to say. So it seems hard to believe that it was intentional.

And then that led a few years later in Borat. There's a scene where you're defecating in the garden of Trump Tower. It was that kind of.

Yes, that is correct. That is correct. That a kind of payback for what happened with the you, not a payback.

I just always I always knew he'd amount to great things. I, I always had faith in him. So I thought I should defecate in front of his, um, towel. And then actually in the another movie, he ends up contracting HIV as well, which is now completely curable, which is fantastic. So I don't see why he was upset by that.

Coming up, Sacha reveals the unlikely part he played in breaking up Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock. Seriously.

So speaking of Borat, I actually watched it for probably the 15th or 20th time today before this interview. And it's just as great as ever. And I think, you know, for for me and for a lot of people, the hardest time that I've ever laughed in a movie theater is that naked fight scene, which I don't know what it is about it, but it just it brings out something in people. What do you remember from from filming that particular.

Nothing I plan to roll out now. I remember basically I wrote with a couple of brilliant writers, Peter Beinart and Dan Maisonette Hines, and I wrote it with me sitting on his face. And then we go into the room.

We like the director, Larry Charles said, actually, it's funny if he sits in your face and I know is it read the script, Larry, in the script, I sit on his back so anybody can do this.

You know, fantastic actor was you know, it's a big he's a big guy. He's a big guy.

And so I was scared that I would not be able to breathe underneath because his buttocks was so big. It's like when you kill someone with a pillow. His products were enough to cover my entire face and create a seal around. So I had a certain amount of seconds and I said to Larry, tell us, like, OK, here's the code, which is if I tap the bed, tap the mattress three times, that means I'm out of oxygen and you pull it, you show car and you rip him off.

Anyway, what do you see? The actual scene, you see me banging three times and they do nothing.

And I did I mention this once? I did. At that point, I realized I had two choices. Either I could die or I could suck the air that had been stuck up by Kosar.

And in that moment I chose to die.

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So the climax of that movie is the Pamela Anderson kidnapping scene, which there's been a long debate over whether she was in on it or not. So do you do you want to clear that up for everyone now? Is was Pamela Anderson in on that moment? So she was the only person in on that movie? Yes, she was. I think otherwise it would have been kidnapping. Right. Right.

And we did that scene twice, actually, the first time we did a book signing. And I grabbed her over my shoulder and ran out with her.

And no one did anything like water. What kind of fans are they? So and so we did it again.

And they they started running off to me and I turned and I didn't realize. But she actually clipped her jaw and she's actually amazingly brave. She lost a tiny bit of she two things. One, she lost a tiny bit of bone from her jaw. So she should really have got an award for that.

And secondly, she lost her husband. So my wife is know. Yeah, it's okay.

So later on, Tommy Lee, not Tommy Lee. Kid Rock saw the movie and I texted Pamela Anderson. I said, I have to go. What do you think? And she takes it back. He's getting divorced. I was like, why? She goes the movie. And I thought it was a joke. But then a few weeks later, they got divorced and they put a reason for divorce.

Borat. So. So I had some casualties.

Yeah. You can take credit for that, too. That's, uh, you got Dana.

I mean, I think they were a fantastic couple, much better than Julian Assange or whoever she dated, right? Yeah.

Hi. Hello. My name a Borat today. If I sat there and the both of the rapist on my former husband of Oksana, who was the author of My Life By and Out of the Rapist. I make it this for you, and this is her name, I now hear your name Pamela Anderson took me out of this to this day, this year. And today's wedding is inside of me. Oh, no. Agreements are necessary.

So you've said that you don't you're not making another season of who is America that you think might be another, you know, decade or so before you could do something like this again? What do you want to do next?

I tell you, I can't be bothered to know. I don't know.

I mean, the principle has always been to do stuff that I love and that challenges me. And I mean it really I didn't you know, when I started off in England, I was from, you know, grew up in north west London, the idea of coming to Hollywood and making movies was impossible. No one had really ever come here since cellar's Hugh Grant and had a tiny bit. And then I can't remember what happened to him. Something on Hollywood Boulevard.

I don't know. We didn't hear about it in England and so it was an impossibility. So when I started off, the idea was to actually my dream was to join this theatre group called Theatre, the complicity here. What kind of physical theatre troupe? So the idea of actually making a TV show and then making a movie and then doing stuff that Americans would watch, some of them would like was literally beyond my wildest dreams. We used to have like a 101 year old South African woman who used to come round our house for Friday night.

And she used you know, me and my brother used to perform and sing songs.

She said, you wake up early Sunday and they will love you. And we're like, yes, that's right. Right.

You know, it seemed completely outlandish. So it's you know, I don't know really. I mean, something has to take my fancy.

You are playing an Israeli spy, I believe, in an upcoming Netflix note. I'm playing not this Israeli spy.

Yeah, I am. Yeah. In a in a Netflix miniseries. Is there anything you can share about about that project? I mean, it's completely straight. Um, it's a true story. Six part about this Egyptian Jew who immigrates to Israel. He's working as an accountant in a supermarket. True story. And the Mossad, pick him and give him a cover as a multimillionaire and he gets sent into Syria alone and becomes the deputy defense minister. Um, so I it was quite an interesting story and, um, ended up in Morocco for four months, shooting at, um.

I am I'm curious, you there are no jokes in it.

Just warning for a long time. You were going to be playing Freddy tonight to make love in it.

Oh. And if somebody somebody can attest there, it is not a pretty sight. Not a pretty sight. I did say that the director actually I go, are you sure I love the script?

But there is actually a sex scene in there and you are aware that you're shooting with me and is your dream to get the audience laughing? It's like, no, I really want this to be really, you know, erotic. I get. No, no, no.

That's never that's never going to happen. If you want belly. Laughs Get me naked anyway. Choose for yourself. I'm in it.

And you already shot that. We've shot that. And how did it go?

Um, it was you know, what happened was I was while I was shooting this show, Morocco, I was reediting this show here. And, um, so actually in the middle of the sex scene in between takes, I was getting up and re editing stuff with the editor. So it was it was hard because the my co-star was like a method actress.

My husband, the I love you I think one minute and then go and like, okay, just go back three frames. Okay. If we just put that word that the action. Yeah. So I feel sorry for her.

I mean another acting job that you were going to do but didn't end up doing was Freddie Mercury. That was long long rumored. And obviously now Rami Malek won won the Oscar this past year for that role and well deserved as well. He did it. Did you get to see it?

And and how are you feeling about that whole thing now? Well, I'm very glad for Remi. And, you know, I talked about this on Howard Stern extensively, so I won't go everywhere. But, you know, ultimately, I'm glad for Queen because it was it was the movie that the. They wanted to make it was not the movie that I wanted to make, and so I'm very happy for them that they realize their dream great.

So we're going to we're going to need some audience questions. So this is about the process of creating new characters, which we kind of touched on. But it also says, who do you who do you trust for notes and feedback when you're when you're creating new characters?

Because, I mean, you're an actor. So, you know, what you have to do is obviously create a character and it to be believable. So I think, you know, I find it really, really hard. And, you know, that might be I think that's that's the struggle we all have. And can we pull it off? My way in to a character is firstly through the words. So, you know, it's like they say if it's not on the page, it's not on the stage.

If you don't have the words, create the character, in my opinion and the specificity of those words and the language and the syntax tell you everything about the character. So when I create character, the first thing I do when I'm with, you know, a couple of a couple of people in the room is we write the funny lines, we're asking questions. Then I.

I actually create a separate document, which is what do those jokes tell us about the character, you know, so so for example, with Ali G, there was a line I wrote, you know, when is it legal to murder someone?

Um, so we got a laugh with that and you go, OK, so, you know, oxymorons are amusing for him, you know, and, you know, you create the character through those lines that are amusing. Then there is obviously the accent and sometimes that was kind of really, really last minute. So I was working with probably the greatest dialect coach in the world, a guy called Tim Monic, who I met on the set of Hugo with Martin Scorsese, and he does all of Tarantino stuff.

He's fantastic. And something like Billy Wayne, the conspiracy theorist. I only managed to get him a few hours before going into my first interview, says a real person who's waiting there who I have to convince them. And I say, OK, where do you want him to be from? I was like, OK, I want him to be from East Tennessee. And then he would teach me, you know, would go through the script and I'd go through, you know, how exactly to pronounce it and then just stay in the voice.

So obviously it was terrifying because, you know, you're coming into a room and you have to convince them that you are real. And there's the added problem, which is that your face is made of silicon. We actually did what we did one sketch with, um, he was, uh, McCutchen. He took on the Supreme Court. He was the guy to go to the Supreme Court to try and have unlimited campaign financing. I managed to get him to prepare and turn his little office cubicle into a mosque in thirty seconds so he could prepare against any kind of ISIS attackers.

And during the interview was in a very, very hot room. The cameraman looks to me and he gives me the signal that meant I had to go out there and I go out of the room and the makeup guys. Then he goes, I go, what's the problem? And he goes, You have three ears.

And I look in the mirror and this air has become horizontal. So it's become horizontal.

You can see one, two, three ears. And somehow this guy who was an intelligent man had not noticed that the man he was talking to had three years. So you have the challenges of physicality. Also, the other challenge with this, which I think is great, is that you want to be able to we call it to become sort of locked into a character, which means once I'm in, I'm in. And you want it to be imperceptible for somebody to see through the character.

And it's obviously hard. You've got a silicon face, you know, faking everything. And so what I do is I try and learn as much back story as possible. So, you know, where did you come in? What hotel are you staying at? Tell me about your childhood, your first wife. You know, we had one situation where Vice President Dick Cheney came in and I was wearing an Israeli army uniform and I realized about half an hour before and he's going to ask me about my army service.

So we had a guy with us who was we were doing that kindergarden section and we were actually he was a weapons expert and Israeli weapons expert.

He'd done some operations there.

And we were carrying around. I mean, we had a truck that were taken around D.C. with machine guns in and rocket launchers. Actually, at one point we got stopped by the Secret Service about a half a mile away from the Congress, and they opened up the back. They saw the weapons checked out and they looked fine, you know, move on. And so, you know, I realized Dick Cheney's coming in.

He's an intelligent guy. And so I said to this. I like. Listen, tell me about your military service and it goes it goes what how much I got everything from the beginning goes. When I was seven years old, I went to school. I had a lunchbox in one end and a gas mask in the other. And that's when I knew I wanted to be a soldier. And he takes me through his military service for half an hour.

Dick Cheney comes in and he says, All right, before we start the interview, who's interviewing me? He sees me. He goes, Soldier, come with me. And we sit down and he decides to groom and he goes, Soldier, tell me about your military service. I go, Vice President Cheney when I was seven years old.

I went to school with the lunchbox in one end and the gas mask in the other, and then I went through the entire military history and it was true.

And so he believed that. Was there ever a moment during the filming of the whole show where someone recognized you as Sacha Baron Cohen? There were no really no, really. I mean, we had there was one thing in the makeup mask. I was the Megapolis kids. Right? I mean, the mega mask was, um, just one person recognized. Maybe we had.

But we with that that scene, we had some actually bigger issues. Where were the security guard? And he said, listen, I don't want you to worry about today because if somebody pulls out a gun and they go to shoot you, um, then I've give it I've prepared this, like, what is it? And he pulls out a clipboard and he goes, this is completely bulletproof. He goes, you just hold it in front of yourself.

Somebody goes with a gun and you just put it in front of yourself. I guess that's great. But I go, it's this big.

I go, what? What do I put it over? I guess. I don't know. I was like, I broke my head, you know, my heart in the end, I just I was like, oh, my most valuable possession.

I realized actually if I stood like this, I could actually actually, um. But it was yeah.

We realized there was a kind of issue in that scene where, again, you know, you're trying to get the scene, you're trying to be imperceptible, you're trying to be, you know, completely immerse yourself in character. And, um, there's a problem that everyone had guns. So the first group of people we brought in, we asked them to leave their guns. We took their guns off the couch. And so they didn't bring in guns.

And then the, uh but the second group, they had their cars parked outside and we knew a lot of them had guns in the car. So we were scared that they would go outside and get their guns and bring the guns back in. And the first time we did it, one of the people, you know, said, listen, you know, now I know why you took our guns away from us. I said, Why? Because we were going to use them against you.

And so what we were concerned about the second time was that it would be a kind of inverse mass shooting where you'd have forty seven shooters and one victim.

And so everyone in the crew, I basically said, OK, you know, what we're going to do is it's going to be the opposite. We're going to have an opt in program where you are choosing now to stay and everyone else has to go because, you know, we were where they could turn into kind of the OK Corral. But luckily it was fine and I'm here and that's why I don't want to do it again.

Well, sadly, I think we have to wrap up just one one quick thing before we go. I like to ask at the end of interviews of comedians, what's the last thing that that made you laugh? Could be a recommendation of a TV show or a movie or just something that you.

Oh, I saw something hilarious called fleabag. Has anybody seen that? It's on Amazon. Wow. You've seen it. I think she's fantastic. I think it's incredibly original, completely real. And yeah, it really made me laugh. I just called her up to say how funny she was and she said, who the fuck are you?

All right. Well, we gotta thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Hey, this is Matt Wilstein from The Last Laugh. Thanks so much to Molly and Rick for sharing my conversation with Sacha Baron Cohen, which was recorded in front of a live audience last year at the SAG after a foundation.

If you want to hear more great interviews with some of the best comedians out there. Please subscribe to my podcast, The Last Laugh, wherever you get your podcasts.

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