Sacha Baron Cohen tends to save his (out-of-character) chattiness mainly for press tours-of-duty, so whenever those come around there tends to be a healthy stockpile anecdotes that the 44-year-old Brit can choose from. Presumably when you’ve been threatened with bodily harm on a regular enough basis, you get a good story or two out of the deal.
Baron Cohen’s promo blitz for The Brothers Grimsby (if you only see one motion picture where Donald Trump contracts HIV…) brought him to The Howard Stern Show, where keeping stories TV14 isn’t necessary. Interestingly enough, the Borat/Brüno mastermind’s two big stories from the interview are relatively family-friendly, if punctuated with some NSFW chatter. The massive one was of course Sacha Baron Cohen explaining why his much-blabbed about role as a big screen Freddie Mercury fell apart, but tantalizing item number two was additional information on how Ali G (booyakasha!) deftly made his way into the Academy Awards.
The Ali G + Oscars story was partially laid out already in a previous interview with Baron Cohen explaining that he had to hide in the bathroom with faux diarrhea and the aid of his wife Isla Fisher to pull off the transformation without the Academy getting wise. The bonus wrinkle to the story? Baron Cohen checked in with Dave Chappelle for his thoughts before trotting out Madonna’s one-time limo driver.
Faced with the prospect of causing a massive fuss with an audience unfamiliar with the Ali G character at an Oscars deemed #OscarsSoWhite, Baron Cohen asked for advice from two people. One was an English guy that advised against Ali G because he thought it’d be a racist gag, but the other guy was the aforementioned Chappelle.
“And then on the way in, I saw Dave Chappelle. And I go, ‘Dave, I need you for 35 seconds, please. Dave, I’m going on, I’m doing Ali G, this is my first line, tell me whether I’m going to get killed.’ He’s like ‘it’s great, get out and do it.”
And lo, the Great Ali G Transformation of 2016 was encouraged to march forward. The full interview clip that we have tucked above is definitely worth a watch to get a nice recap on how the world’s most famous member of “West Staines Massif” was able to magically appear on the broadcast.
(via Bro Bible)
