The Man Behind The Mustache

"Yeah, it would have been bad if you didn't," he muses.

I reassure him.

"Really?"

More reassurance.

"It was hard," he says. "I mean, it was a hard film to make."

Baron Cohen, 35, seems nervous about the release of the film in three days, unsure if the American audience is going to understand it, unsure if its anti-anti-Semitism will be misinterpreted, unsure if it will beat The Santa Clause 3 at the box office, unsure if in editing 400 hours (plus fifty hours of behind-the-scenes footage) down to eighty-four minutes all the right decisions were made.

Despite his worries, the film will go on to hit Number One at the box office, earning back its $18 million budget with $26.4 million in ticket sales. Rarely has a film been heralded by so much fawning media coverage. Borat's performances on nearly every major-television promotional outlet became performance art in themselves, each one a separate scripted comedy. And he stoked the flames of hype even higher with a press conference outside the Kazakh Embassy and a walk to the White House in response to the Kazakh government's rumblings about suing him (and griping about him during a summit with George Bush).

As Borat, Baron Cohen responded, "I'd like to state I have no connection with Mr. Cohen and fully support my government's decision to sue this Jew."

But Today, without the funny mustache, Baron Cohen responds to the statements from the Kazakh government seriously for the first time.

"I've been in a bizarre situation, where a country has declared me as it's number-one enemy," he says, forcing a wry grin. "It's inherently a comic situation." He stops, then backpedals a little. "I mean, it's always risky when you don't go down the normal route." Pause. Maybe he's taking himself too seriously now. "I wish I would have been there at the briefing that Bush got about who I am, who Borat is. It would have had to be great."

When Baron Cohen first heard that the Kazakh government was thinking of suing him and placing a full-page ad promoting the country in The New York Times, he was editing his movie in Los Angeles. His reaction: "I was surprised, because I always had faith in the audience that they would realize that this was a fictitious country and the mere purpose of it was to allow people to bring out their own prejudices. And the reason we chose Kazakhstan was because it was a country that no one had heard anything about, so we could essentially play on stereotypes they might have about this ex-Soviet backwater. The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist — who believe that there's a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and the women live in cages and they drink fermented horse urine and the age of consent has been raised to nine years old."

In actuality, it turns out that Borat is a far more damning critique of America than it is of Kazakhstan. The jokes that Baron Cohen mentions above — and all the rest about beating gypsies, throwing Jews down wells, exporting pubic hair and making monkey porn — are clearly parody. But the America that Borat discovers on his cross-country trek here — rife with homophobia, xenophobia, racism, classism and anti-Semitism — is all too real.

"I think part of the movie shows the absurdity of holding any form of racial prejudice, whether it's hatred of African-Americans or of Jews," Baron Cohen says.

A waiter places a complimentary appetizer in front of Baron Cohen.

"What is this?" he asks.

"Ceviche," the waiter answers.

"No, what's in it?"

"Coconut, fish, yuzu, pomegranate."

Baron Cohen continues to grill the waiter: "What kind of fish?"

It soon becomes clear that he is not merely curious or vegetarian or allergic to peanuts. He keeps kosher and is making sure that there is no shellfish, pork or other forbidden food or food combination in the dish. A devout Jew, Baron Cohen also keeps the Sabbath when he can, which means that he doesn't work from Friday evening to Saturday evening.

Unsure of the waiter's trustworthiness, Baron Cohen pokes at the appetizer as he points out that his parents "love" the Jewish humor. And his maternal grandmother, who's ninety-one and lives in Haifa, Israel, went to a midnight screening, then called her grandson at 4 a.m. to compliment him and dissect the scenes in detail.

"Borat essentially works as a tool," Baron Cohen says. "By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' [a song performed at a country & western bar during Da Ali G Show] was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought that it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism. But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tucson. And the question is: Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism.