HOLLYWOOD -- It was a little disconcerting to see Sacha Baron Cohen without his Borat mustache.
When the lanky comedian showed up the other day for his first newspaper interview as himself since the inception of Borat-mania last fall, Cohen looked a little smaller than life, especially compared with the outsize character who caused such a sensation in Borat.
Sipping hot lemon tea at a coffee shop in Santa Monica, Cohen had the air of a man who had shed a layer of skin that had been worn to a frazzle. With a thatch of unruly black hair and a three-day beard, wearing a rumpled corduroy jacket, the 35-year-old comic could pass for a young film professor at the University of California, Los Angeles without attracting a second glance. His thick Kazakh accent was gone, replaced by a sober British purr.
Most comics drop the act when the movie finishes. But for months last fall, wherever he went, Cohen arrived in full Borat drag, taking the Toronto Film Festival by storm, holding a news conference outside the Kazakh embassy in Washington and, while accepting a magazine honor, praising Mel Gibson, saying, "It is you, not me, who should receive this GQ award for anti-Jew warrior of the year."
Still, the burden of being Borat took its toll, especially during months of filming when, to keep up the charade, he was Borat from dawn to dusk.
"It was exhausting," he recalls, slumped in the booth, fighting off a nagging cold. "I had to be that way all day and all night, because even if the tiniest detail had gone awry, it could've made them suspicious. I mean, even if I went to the bathroom, I had to make sure I went to the bathroom as Borat."
He allowed a tiny sliver of a smile. "There would definitely be potpourri in the toilet, so you'd know Borat had been there."
Cohen cleverly created a comic character that provided him free passage for all sorts of outrageous behavior, be it lewd remarks about women, mocking of worshipers at a Pentecostal church or a visit to a gun shop where he asked the proprietor, "What is best gun to defend against Jew?"
Having perfected this sly schtick in television doing Da Ali G Show, where he posed as a gold-chain-encrusted hip-hop dunce, torturing a variety of government officials with wildly inappropriate questions, Cohen has become a master provocateur. Borat - whose persona dates to Ali G - seems uniquely suited to our time.
