Sipping hot lemon tea at a coffee shop in Santa Monica, Cohen had the air of a man who had shed a layer of skin that had been worn to a frazzle. Most comics drop the act when the movie finishes. But for months last fall, wherever he went, Cohen arrived in full Borat drag, taking the Toronto Film Festival by storm, holding a news conference outside the Kazakh embassy in Washington and, praising Mel Gibson, saying, “It is you, not me, who should receive this GQ award for anti-Jew warrior of the year.”

The burden of being Borat took its toll, especially during months of filming when, to keep up the charade, he was Borat from dawn to dusk. “Even if I went to the bathroom, I went to the bathroom as Borat.”

Having perfected this sly shtick in television doing Da Ali G Show, where he posed as a gold-chain-encrusted hip-hop dunce, torturing a variety of government officials with wildly inappropriate questions, Cohen has become a master provocateur. Cohen’s breakthrough is that he presents his comedy in a realistic setting — with recognisable people, people who might live next door, as foils.

Some of the people Cohen and his director, Larry Charles, filmed say their actions were taken out of context. A number of people in the movie have complained or filed suit, claiming they were hoodwinked. “This wasn’t Candid Camera,” he says. “There were two large cameras in the room. I don’t buy the argument that, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have acted so racist or anti-Semitic if I’d known this film was being shown in America.’”

Born into a middle-class family in London, Cohen had early dreams of being a basketball player or a break dancer. He spent a year on a kibbutz as a teenager and was a member of Habonim, a Socialist-Zionist youth movement. At Cambridge he read history and wrote a dissertation on the Jews, Blacks’ anti-Semitism. “I argued that came out of Jews feeling betrayed by their old blood brothers from the civil-rights movement. My conclusion was black Americans didn’t see Jews as being more involved than any white Americans.”

Not long after graduating from Cambridge, Cohen found himself drawn to the early hip-hop scene in London, where he became a fan of a hip-hop DJ named Tim Westwood. “I’m sure he helped inspire Ali G.” I’d thought he was black, because he sounded like a New York gangster, but he was actually a tall, skinny white guy who was the son of a bishop.”

Soon Cohen was creating Ali G-style sketches for TV, which spawned the character that became Borat. During filming for the movie he never washed his gray suit and never wore deodorant. “The smell is an added thing for people to believe that I’m from a country where hygiene wasn’t a necessity,” he explains.

—Patrick Goldstein / LATWP