LONDON — For nearly three decades, the man who has been chased by police, tackled by a UFC fighter, placed on a government watch list, and sued more times than almost any actor alive has maintained a singular, unbreakable rule: never break character on camera. But in a rare, revealing dissection of his most infamous creation, Sacha Baron Cohen has finally pulled back the curtain on the psychological mechanics, the genuine physical danger, and the profound philosophical misunderstanding that defines Borat Sagdiyev.

The revelation cuts to the core of a career built on calculated chaos. Cohen, the soft-spoken Cambridge-educated historian who disappears entirely into his grotesque alter egos, has long insisted that Borat is not a joke aimed downward at ordinary people, but a weapon aimed upward at authority. The distinction, he explains, traces back to a legendary French clown instructor named Philippe Gaulier, who corrected the young comedian’s assumption that his characters were simply idiots.

Gaulier introduced him to the medieval tradition of the buffoon—a sharp, ancient theatrical form where outcasts mock the powerful until the kings and bishops in the audience can no longer stand it. That single lesson, Cohen reveals, explains everything from his interview with a baffled Buzz Aldrin to his infiltration of a secure NASA facility.

The method, however, demands a level of commitment that borders on the pathological. Cohen admits that he cannot simply perform Borat for a scene and then step out of the character. The illusion collapses the moment he stops being the person.

During one early, failed attempt, a bystander noticed his distinctly Western underwear, and the entire fabrication unraveled instantly. From that moment forward, he adopted a rule that would define his career: he must become a complete person the moment anyone might be watching, ready for absolutely anything. This has meant stretches of undercover performance lasting three full days without a break, living in constant terror that a single slip of the tongue or a lapse in accent could unravel hours of careful setup—or, more critically, get him deported.

The stakes were never theoretical. While filming the original Borat film, Cohen was not yet a US citizen, and his stunts kept landing him in genuine legal jeopardy. He essentially lived undercover for a year and a half, terrified that an arrest would see him shipped back to London before the film was finished.

The psychological toll was immense; he admits it took six months after production wrapped before he could speak to a police officer without his heart rate spiking. The chaos was relentless. During one stretch of filming a Middle Eastern character driving an ice cream van, police calls came in so frequently that the FBI eventually assigned a team to investigate.

In total, officers were called out 92 separate times during production of the original film.

The fallout extended far beyond police reports and into the realm of international diplomacy. The small Romanian village of Glod, used to portray Borat’s fictional Kazakh hometown, filed a $30 million lawsuit after realizing they had been portrayed as backward and violent; most villagers spoke no English and had no idea what they had agreed to film. The actual government of Kazakhstan reacted with fury, banning the film and accusing Cohen of depicting their nation as a haven for misogynists and anti-Semites.

The situation escalated to the highest levels of power when Cohen, in character, pretended to kiss the country’s real prime minister at the MTV Awards. The incensed prime minister reportedly flew to Washington D. C.

to lodge a formal complaint with the American government, turning a British comedian in a gray suit into the catalyst for an honest-to-goodness diplomatic incident.

But it is the physical danger, not the lawsuits, that truly separates Cohen from every other comedian working today. During the second Borat film, he attended a gun rights rally at the height of COVID conspiracy fever, wearing a bulletproof vest for the first time in his career because the crowd around him was armed with genuine semi-automatic weapons. When someone recognized him, the situation turned violent instantly.

A man pulled a gun before a guard grabbed it away. Cohen and his crew fled into a waiting ambulance, only to find themselves surrounded by armed men trying to pry the doors open. He survived by bracing himself against the floor and pulling the door shut by sheer physics until his team could talk their way clear.

Years earlier, during Bruno, he had walked into a similarly dangerous scenario at a live UFC ring in Arkansas, where a trained mixed martial artist vaulted the cage wall to attack him. Only a pre-built trap door saved him.

Perhaps the most consequential moment of his career came during the sequel’s final act, when Borat’s fictional teenage daughter conducted a pandemic interview with Rudy Giuliani. Believing the cameras had stopped rolling, Giuliani invited the young woman into a hotel bedroom, where he lay back on the bed and reached down the front of his trousers. The moment became global news.

Giuliani claimed he was simply tucking in his shirt; Cohen responded with characteristic dryness, suggesting that if Giuliani believed that behavior was appropriate, heaven only knows what he thought was appropriate with other women. What almost nobody realized at the time was that Cohen himself was hiding inside the room’s wardrobe the entire time, waiting for the perfect comedic moment to burst out. Giuliani sued for $95 million.

Cohen won, extending his perfect legal record—he has not lost a single lawsuit stemming from any of his films.

The irony of Borat’s legacy is that the joke eventually won over its biggest target. For over a decade, Kazakhstan treated Borat as a national insult, pouring millions into a rebuttal advertising campaign called “Heart of Eurasia.” But when the sequel was announced in 2020, the tourism board made an unthinkable pivot: they adopted Borat’s catchphrase, “Very nice,” as the centerpiece of an official tourism campaign, showcasing the country’s real mountains and cities.

Cohen responded with warmth, telling the New York Times that the actual Kazakhstan is a beautiful country, the complete opposite of Borat’s version. In a strange corner of marketing history, Borat Sagdiyev accidentally became one of the best tourism ambassadors Kazakhstan ever had.

Underneath the chaos lies serious technical craft. For The Trial of the Chicago 7, a film demanding word-for-word accuracy with zero improvisation, Cohen developed a workaround: he would perform a scripted take exactly as written, then keep the camera rolling, pause for two seconds, and deliver the same monologue again in a completely different emotional register, giving the editor wildly different performances to cut between. During Les Misérables, he blew out his singing voice and had to spend the rest of the shoot on total vocal rest, silently mouthing directions to preserve enough voice to sing live on camera.

And in a detail that sounds too strange to be true, he insists that his insistence on making a fictional missile prop look more phallic for The Dictator may have genuinely influenced how Elon Musk approached the aerodynamics of a real SpaceX rocket nose cone.

So what do we make of Borat, all these years and lawsuits and near-riots later? Cohen has always insisted the joke was never about mocking any one country or type of person. It was a mirror.

Put a decent, kind person in a room with Borat’s outrageous behavior, and they generally stay decent and kind. Put someone already carrying real prejudice into that same room, and Borat simply gives them enough rope to reveal it themselves on camera. Sasha Baron Cohen built an entire career on a radical, almost reckless kind of honesty disguised as the world’s most convincing idiot.

And in doing so, he proved something most comedians never manage to prove at all: sometimes the fastest way to expose the truth is to walk into a room pretending you don’t understand a single thing about it.