Sacha Baron Cohen

Info

Full Name: Sacha Noam Baron Cohen
Date of birth: October 13, 1971 (54 years old)
Location: Hammersmith, Londres
Country: UK

Sacha Baron Cohen has been active for 24 years, participating in 20 movies that average a 6.2/10 score.

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Biography

In July 2026 a man in yellow shades, a mesh skullcap and a yellow tracksuit turned up at the Wimbledon finals. It was Ali G, twenty four years after his last film, and it confirmed what had been going round for weeks: Sacha Baron Cohen had shot a new one in secret. He announced it himself on 22 July, in character, and days later Amazon MGM set 'Ali G: Who Iz I?' for 23 October. It is also his first film as director.

None of which is a surprise by now. Baron Cohen has spent nearly thirty years doing the same thing: invent an idiot, put him in a room with real people and wait to hear what they say when they think nobody serious is listening.

Baron Cohen was born in Hammersmith on 13 October 1971, into a Jewish family. His mother, Daniella Weiser, was born in Mandatory Palestine. His father, Gerald, came from a Belarusian Jewish family that had settled in London, and grew up in Pontypridd. There are two older brothers, one of them a composer, and among his cousins is the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the best known autism researchers in the world.

He read history at Christ's College, Cambridge, and wrote his dissertation on the role of Jewish activists in the American civil rights movement. Along the way he acted with the university's drama club, spent a year on an Israeli kibbutz and, after graduating, went to Paris to train as a clown under Philippe Gaulier. Before any of that he had modelled and presented shows on cable television in Windsor.

Ali G, from Staines to a BAFTA

The character surfaced in 1998 on Channel 4's 'The 11 O'Clock Show'. Ali G was a white lad from Staines who believed himself a Jamaican gangster, interviewing politicians, bishops and scientists who had no clue they were the joke. It won him best newcomer at the 1999 British Comedy Awards.

The method rarely changed. Walking in dressed as Ali G, passing for crew, he would let the subject assume the man in the suit beside him was the real interviewer, then reveal himself seconds before the cameras rolled. 'Da Ali G Show' took the BAFTA for best comedy in 2001. Along the way he appeared in Madonna's video for 'Music', interviewed the Beckhams for Comic Relief and got the character into cinemas with 'Ali G Indahouse' (2002). A year later HBO commissioned an American version.

Britain took to him faster than anywhere else. In a 2000 episode he offered the former Conservative MP Neil Hamilton what was presented as cannabis, and Hamilton smoked it, which kept the tabloids busy for a week. Channel 4 viewers voted Ali G the eighth greatest television character of all time in a 2001 poll, and in 2012 he collected the outstanding achievement prize at the British Comedy Awards in character, handed to him by Ben Kingsley. BAFTA gave him its Charlie Chaplin Britannia Award for excellence in comedy the following year.

Borat, Brüno and a dictator

The other two came out of the same programme. Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh reporter in a grey suit, got his own film in 2006 with 'Borat', directed by Larry Charles. The film crossed America on the pretext of courting Pamela Anderson, leaving rodeos, fraternity houses and elected officials to condemn themselves.

It won him the Golden Globe for best actor in a comedy and an Oscar nomination for adapted screenplay. Kazakhstan took it badly, banning the release, threatening to sue and buying four pages in The New York Times to rebut it. Fourteen years later, timed to the sequel, the country adopted Borat's "very nice" as the official slogan of its tourism campaign.

'Brüno' (2009), about an Austrian fashion presenter, followed. It generated a run of lawsuits and one deleted scene in which a crowd chased him through Jerusalem. To promote it he dropped from the ceiling at the MTV Movie Awards dressed as an angel and landed backside first on Eminem, who stormed out. The rapper admitted months later that it had been arranged.

'The Dictator' arrived in 2012 with no hidden cameras and an invented tyrant modelled on Gaddafi. That year he worked the Oscars red carpet in costume and tipped an urn of fake ashes over the presenter Ryan Seacrest.

The old format came back for 'Who Is America?' (2018), in which a supposed former Mossad officer talked several serving American politicians into arguing on camera for arming three year olds. One of them, the Georgia state representative Jason Spencer, resigned.

With the costume off

Running alongside all this is a fairly conventional acting career, and not always a minor one. There was the French driver in 'Talladega Nights' (2006) with Will Ferrell, the fraudulent Italian barber in 'Sweeney Todd' for Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, and King Julien across the 'Madagascar' films, which is probably how most children know him.

Martin Scorsese cast him as the station inspector in 'Hugo' (2011), opposite Asa Butterfield and Ben Kingsley, and Tom Hooper had him singing Thénardier in 'Les Misérables' (2012) with Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter. Then came 'Alice Through the Looking Glass' (2016), Uncle Ugo's voice in 'Luca' and a quick turn as a BBC anchor in 'Anchorman 2' (2013).

Not everything landed. 'Grimsby' (2016), with Baron Cohen as a football hooligan from the town dragged into a spy plot, flopped hard, and he has been fairly candid about it since.

For years he was attached to the Freddie Mercury biopic, walking away in 2013 over disagreements with Queen. The part went to Rami Malek, who won an Oscar for it.

His strongest run as a straight actor came in 2019 and 2020. First he played the Israeli spy Eli Cohen in 'The Spy', the Netflix miniseries that brought a Golden Globe nomination. Then came the activist Abbie Hoffman in 'The Trial of the Chicago 7', written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, which gave him his only acting Oscar nomination. The cast took the SAG ensemble award.

The same year he released 'Borat Subsequent Moviefilm', shot through the pandemic and the American election campaign, which brought another Golden Globe and another screenplay nomination. In 2024 he played Robert Ravenscroft, a husband running a distinctly shady charity, in 'Disclaimer', Alfonso Cuarón's series with Cate Blanchett.

Off camera

Baron Cohen met the Australian actress Isla Fisher at a party in Sydney in 2001. They got engaged in 2004, she converted to Judaism and they married in March 2010. They have two daughters and a son. In April 2024 they jointly announced that they had separated at the end of 2023, and the divorce was finalised in June 2025, with a statement saying they remained friends.

The other side of him that makes headlines is political. In November 2019 he collected an award from the Anti-Defamation League with a speech calling the big platforms "the greatest propaganda machine in history" and describing the "Silicon Six" as billionaires accountable to nobody. Facebook replied that he had misrepresented its policies. Substantial sums have gone to Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee for Syria, Yemen and Sudan.

An odd sort of year

2026 has brought him three very different things. April gave him 'Balls Up', Peter Farrelly's action comedy with Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walter Hauser. May brought 'Ladies First' on Netflix, directed by Thea Sharrock, with him as a chauvinist who wakes up in a matriarchal society and runs into Rosamund Pike. Critics disliked both.

Before either of those, in June 2025, he did something nobody saw coming: he turned up at the end of 'Ironheart' as Mephisto, the devil Marvel had been hinting at for years, opposite Dominique Thorne. He has since suggested he will be back.

And in October, Ali G returns. At 54, after two decades alternating disguises with parts as serious people, Baron Cohen has gone back to where it all started, this time sitting in the director's chair as well.