The Man Behind The Mustache

"The first time I got stopped by the police, I thought to myself, 'What do I do?,' because I was separated from the crew," Baron Cohen says. "And I thought, 'There can't be a law against speaking in a funny voice to a policeman.' Plus, I didn't know what story the rest of the crew had told the police since they'd separated all of us. I remember Larry was quite surprised when the Secret Service stopped us outside the White House and I stayed in character."

"We were in front of the White House in the ice cream van with all our camera equipment in the back, and the Secret Service pulled us over," Charles says. "And Sacha stayed in character: He asked them what organization they were from, and they said, 'Secret Service,' and he said, 'Like KGB?' He stays so cool under fire."

The crew's first objective when the police came was to get Baron Cohen away as quickly as possible, because if he were arrested, he'd be deported and the movie would be finished. In Manhattan, after shooting a scene in which Borat thinks that because his hotel bill is so high he must have purchased his room's furniture as well, the line producer and first assistant director ended up spending nineteen hours in jail. This happened because the hotel manager flipped out when he saw Borat dragging his room's comforter and alarm clock through the lobby. When a warrant was issued for Baron Cohen's arrest as well, the crew shipped him out of state to a hotel in New Jersey.

Just mentioning one of his covert interview tactics over dinner causes Baron Cohen to squirm. "You actually know more about the process than . . . " He pauses. "Anyone who's not actually part of it." Long pause. "That's a disaster. Terrible for me." Nervous laughter.

It sometimes seems as if Baron Cohen is doing himself a disservice by being so secretive about his techniques. After all, what makes his comedy so effective is not the process, which anyone could approximate and replicate anyway, but Baron Cohen himself.

"My parents were incredibly loving," he explains. "And I think that gives you the strength to go out into a crowd of people who hate you." Pause. Doubt. Realization that this comment may follow him in interviews for years to come. Backpedal. "Probably. If you want to analyze it."

The youngest of three boys, Baron Cohen spent his formative years at the private Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School near London. His grandmother was an acclaimed ballet dancer who fled Germany during the Third Reich. She relocated to Haifa, where she started her own fitness school combining yoga, aquatics and aerobics for older people — an occupation which, at age ninety-one, she continues to this day. In London, her daughter (Baron Cohen's mother) made a living by teaching her school of movement. And Baron Cohen's father, from Wales, owned a clothing store in Piccadilly Circus.

Baron Cohen's future was set when he was roughly eight years old by two significant events. The first was seeing one of Peter Sellers' Pink Panther movies at a friend's ninth birthday party — setting off a lifelong admiration of the British comic actor's work. The other was when his older brothers snuck him into a theater to see Monty Python's Life of Brian/. A few years later, Baron Cohen started listening to tapes of the show Derek and Clive, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. And, among Sellers, Python and Cook, his comedy tastes were cemented.

"As a kid, I was also very into rap," Baron Cohen adds. He hesitates, reluctant to divulge any information about himself, because every new fact is soon scrupulously added to his scant official biography. After a moment, he relents: "I used to break-dance. Starting at the age of twelve, my mother would take me and my crew in the back of her Volvo. We had the linoleum in the back, and she'd drive us to Covent Garden in the dead middle of winter, and we'd pull the lino out and start breaking."

What was the name of the group?

Hesitation. Acceptance. "Well, we didn't really have a name until we started doing bar mitzvahs. I think we were called Black on White. We used mainly robotics. Essentially, we were middle-class Jewish white boys, who were adopting this culture, which we thought was very cool. That was sort of the origins of Ali G."

Dan Mazer met Baron Cohen at the Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School when the two were eleven years old. "It's basically a factory of comedy," he says of Haberdashers'. "It's just cocky young Jews. And because we were all too weak to fight each other, we compensated with verbal jousts. Sacha was always the gregarious one in a room. He was such a big personality that I didn't envision him being able to hide himself so well with such brilliantly formed characters as Borat and Ali G."

In high school, Baron Cohen spent much of his time with a Jewish youth group, Habonim Dror, where he started acting. When he graduated, he took a year off to live in Israel at the Rosh Hanikra Kibbutz, then attended Christ's College at Cambridge University to study history, ultimately performing in productions like Fiddler on the Roof with the Cambridge Footlights.

During college, Baron Cohen also laid down the roots for his future career: "I started developing characters partly as a way to get into places without paying. At Cambridge there was something called the Cambridge Balls, which at that time cost about 120 pounds per head. I would try to get myself and other people in, pretending to be the band or something. And we'd do it. I remember when I came to New York at the age of twenty-three, it was a fun thing. Me and my friends, we would get into the clubs claiming we were bouncers or drug dealers."