Sacha Baron Cohen (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
A couple year ago while on the set of Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” in which Sacha Baron Cohen played a crusty station master, the actor approached producer Graham King about a planned biopic on the rock band Queen.
“Sacha said that he really wanted the part of Freddie Mercury, and asked what he would have to do to get it,” an insider tells The Post. “Graham asked him to sing a few notes, and suddenly Sacha got really shy. He couldn’t do it. He must have done it later, in private, as he’s got the part, but it was interesting that someone so confident in his on-screen endeavors could be intimidated by a situation like that.”
Sure enough, the disconnect between the British actor-comedian and his characters, including Eastern European journalist Borat and flamboyant Austrian fashion icon Bruno, is about as sharp as it gets. How can you not scratch your head at the irony of a man who became famous for brazenly ambushing clueless politicians and civilians with outrageous questions, being, himself, a shy, well-mannered, religious chap who’d rather move to a remote part of Kazakhstan than show up in public out of costume?
This is, after all, a performer who, in the guise of idiotic b-boy Ali G, once asked Newt Gingrich, “Ain’t the problem that if there is a woman president, they’s gonna spend all their time on shopping, getting facials and new shoes?”
What could possibly intimidate that person? As it turns out, fame.
Cohen’s new movie, “The Dictator,” opens May 16, and anyone hoping that this new round of press interest will force the star to become more open about himself, his process and his private life is going to be disappointed.
Cohen almost never gives interviews out of character, and for “The Dictator,” he will be meeting the media as His Excellency, Admiral-General Aladeen, a bearded Mammar Khadafy-like figure who rules over the fictitious Middle Eastern realm of Wadiya. The movie’s plot finds the haughty dictator stripped of his power, dropped in New York and forced to work at a health food store with Anna Faris.
“I think that essentially I’m a private person, and to reconcile that with being famous is a hard thing,” Cohen once told Rolling Stone. “So I’ve been trying to have my cake and eat it, too — to have my characters be famous yet still live a normal life where I’m not trapped by fame and recognizability.”
To judge by assessments of Hollywood paparazzi, Cohen is living the dream.
“Sacha Baron Cohen is not only notorious for being one of the hardest celebrities to find and shoot in Hollywood, he’s also extremely notorious for being as obstructive and rude as he can to avoid having his photo taken,” says Owen Beiny, director of paparazzi operations at World Entertainment News Network. “He’s on my Top 10 list of ‘don’t bother with’ celebrities. It’s not worth the hassle.”
Cohen guards his privacy so tightly that his friends and family are instructed not to talk about him. When he married actress Isla Fisher in 2010, he eschewed an elaborate wedding with friends for a tiny Parisian ceremony with just a handful of relatives. Fisher later e-mailed friends the news, saying, “Sacha and I wanted no fuss — just us!”
When their second daughter was born last year, the couple kept the name secret for months. Fisher begged off when asked point-blank about the name on “Live! With Regis and Kelly.” (For the record, she’s called Elula.) The family now lives in a gated $19 million, seven-bedroom compound set into a Laurel Canyon hillside near Hollywood.
A former staffer at Pace, a secluded Italian restaurant in the Hollywood Hills, says that Cohen would dine there frequently because of its out-of-the-way location.
“Even though we were so low-key, he would still ask for the most private table, and the wait staff would be advised that if any patrons recognized him, to try and prevent them approaching his party,” the staffer tells The Post. “It was pretty clear that he found fan encounters very uncomfortable, and even though he was always polite to staff and tipped well, he never seemed able to let his hair down and really enjoy himself.”
Cohen, 40, grew up in a tony,
largely Jewish London neighborhood called Hampstead Garden Suburb. His father ran a clothing store; his mother was a fitness instructor.
He attended Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School, a 320-year-old bastion of privilege. When he was 8, he became obsessed with Peter Sellers after seeing one of the “Pink Panther” movies.
“He was always a memorable guy — tall and charismatic — but he had a lot of the geek about him,” one school friend tells The Post. “I guess that’s something he uses in his comedy, but at heart there’s an insecurity about him which I don’t think he’s ever lost.”
Cohen attended prestigious Cambridge University, where he was involved in the theater scene and a production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” To amuse himself and avoid paying door charges, he developed a talent for talking his way into clubs and stuffy social functions.
After school, he began creating characters, including MC Jocelyn Cheadle-Hume, the precursor to Ali G, who was based on a British hip-hop DJ who was the posh white son of a bishop. One day, Cohen, while in character, began interacting with a group of young skaters he happened upon, and he had a career-changing epiphany when he realized that people would actually believe his ridiculous persona. The character’s name was later changed to Ali G to make it more racially ambiguous.
A high-profile gig on England’s Channel 4 followed. Cohen became so popular that No. 1 faux-Brit Madonna cast him in her video for “Music,” and Prince William reported that even the late queen mother was a fan. After Christmas dinner one year, the royal got up from the table and said, “Darling, lunch was marvelous. Respect!” using Ali G’s catchphrase and a giving a snap of the fingers.
Two seasons on HBO came later, as well as hit movies “Borat” and “Bruno.” America, too, fell in love with his gutsy, squirm-inducing brand of comedy.
“He has an embarrassment chip missing,” says one top comedy writer who worked with Cohen. “Where other people would be bashful about doing crazy stunts, he really will do anything for a laugh, without any fear of the consequences.”
Yet out of character, he remains oddly cowed.
“That’s why you hardly ever see him interviewed out of character. He likes to hide behind the cartoon figures because they protect him,” says a school friend. “From what I hear, he’s still happiest working with the people he’s known since school. He was great mates with [‘Borat’ co-writer] Dan Mazer even back then, and his brother [‘Borat’ and ‘The Dictator’ composer] Erran is another one.”
One area where Cohen is not shy is in his work ethic.
“It’s a bit like he has Aspberger’s,” says the comedy writer. “He is incredibly focused, and can work crazy-long hours without a break. He’s a really nice guy, but an intense person to work for. Where other comedy teams would work from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and then give up because all your creative juices are spent, he’ll be up till midnight, demanding more ideas from his team. He’ll want 100 ideas a day and only accept two. It was one of the toughest jobs I’ve ever had.”
Jason Mantzoukas, who plays General Aladeen’s sidekick in “The Dictator,” says the production would often film for 14 hours a day. Some takes lasted as long as 20 minutes, as he, Cohen and the other cast members improvised, creating a massive amount of material.
“We shot for months, and Sacha is in every shot,” Mantzoukas says. “I don’t understand how he’s able to do it for this long. He is relentless. I’ve never seen anybody work that hard or tenaciously.”
Cohen also has a habit of staying in character when the cameras aren’t rolling. The same is expected of his co-stars.
“Even when we weren’t on set, we’d have to wake up and dress as Azamat and Borat,” says Ken Davitian, who played the sidekick in “Borat.” “We would even eat meals together in character. We wouldn’t even speak English. I even had to think in Armenian. Sacha doesn’t speak a word of Armenian, and I don’t speak a word of Hebrew [which Cohen used in the film], so it was really his ability to get his ideas across with his eyes and his gestures that meant we were able to communicate.”
“His process was built on those immersive hidden-camera shows [such as ‘Da Ali G Show’], and with those, he has to stay in character, a lot of times for a whole day,” Mantzoukas says. “He’s done that for so long, I think that’s become his process.”
The star does take a break on Friday and Saturday. Cohen is Jewish, keeps kosher and rarely works on the Sabbath. When asked to appear on “Saturday Night Live” in 2005 as Borat, Cohen wrestled with the decision because it involved working on Saturday; he ultimately accepted. Fisher reportedly converted to Judaism in order to marry him, taking the Hebrew name Ayala.
Family life grounds Cohen, according to friends.
“He is a different person when Isla is around. He’s so much calmer,” says Davitian, who is producing a new movie called “Wild Oats” with Shirley MacLaine. “I asked Isla, ‘Does he ever yell?’ and she said, ‘No, I’ve never heard him raise his voice.’ ”
Ben Kingsley, who plays the general’s “minister of security and procurer of women” in “The Dictator,” says Cohen isn’t particularly funny in real life, describing him as “intelligent, kind, a great listener.” The comedian’s private nature is no surprise to Kingsley.
“I’m the same in that I’m not auditioning all my life,” he says. “When you’re a young, ambitious performer, you do want to conquer the room, however benignly. You do want to be the It person in the room. Then it’s no longer important. Then you realize you can be the It person on the screen. He’s not ‘on’ all the time.”
One more glimpse into Cohen’s humanity came courtesy of Harry Thompson, Cohen’s former British TV producer. Thompson wrote in London’s Sunday Times that the comedian is troubled by some of the stunts his characters pulled.
“Guilt, of course, entered into the equation,” he wrote. “Sacha is a genuinely nice person and couldn’t bear the fact that some of his victims were, too.”
Tomorrow afternoon at the Waldorf-Astoria, Cohen is set to give a press conference as General Aladeen to promote his film. It promises to be fun and outrageous in all the right ways. Just don’t expect it to shed any light on the man behind the beard.
reed.tucker@nypost.com