Sacha Baron Cohen: Israel’s Spy in Damascus Was the Greatest Method Actor
First published in Arabic in September 2019: Sacha Baron Cohen on playing Mossad spy Eli Cohen in The Spy, duping Dick Cheney and why he gave $1m to Syrians.
Last year the Georgia Republican state representative Jason Spencer was forced to resign after the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen exposed him in his series Who Is America?. Disguised as Erran Morad, a fake Israeli military expert, Mossad agent and counter-terrorism specialist, Baron Cohen persuaded Spencer, known for his hostility to Muslims, to bare his buttocks and shout racist slurs while fighting imaginary terrorists.
Spencer condemned the deception and accused Baron Cohen of insulting Israel and smearing its security men. Other American politicians and power brokers who count themselves friends of Israel also protested at being duped and having their ideological extremism, their racism and their passion for violence and firearms exposed. They claimed they fell into his trap because they trust the professionalism of Israeli security men.
Among them was the former American vice-president Dick Cheney, who boasted about the wars he launched and the torture of terrorism suspects, telling Baron Cohen that he was very proud of the Iraq war and the lethal weapons his army used there, and that had he not liberated Iraq it would have become a breeding ground for terrorists. At the end of the interview he signed a water tank of the kind used for waterboarding suspects during interrogation and gave it to him as a gift.
Members of Congress also fell for the comedian’s tricks. Some agreed to promote arming nursery-school children with guns after he told them about a fictitious Israeli programme that armed children there and had foiled terrorist attacks.
He also embarrassed campaigners against Islamist terrorism by convincing them that the only way to defeat a Muslim terrorist was to confront him with pork and sexual images, and they actually began training with him in these methods.
The Americans’ naivety and blind faith in Israeli security men shocked Israelis and made them a laughing stock there. Even so, Baron Cohen’s victims went on defending Israel and declaring their faith in the abilities of its soldiers.
The spy who fooled Damascus
These days Baron Cohen is preparing to launch a new series, The Spy, in which he plays a real Israeli Mossad agent, Eli Cohen. Cohen arrived in Damascus in 1962 disguised as a Syrian businessman named Kamel Amin Thabet and fooled Syria’s leaders, who trusted him with sensitive military secrets that he promptly passed to Israel, until he was unmasked in 1965 and sentenced to death.
When I met him at the London hotel in West Hollywood, he told me that there is no difference between Eli Cohen and Erran Morad. “Like Morad’s victims, Cohen’s Syrian victims were embarrassed and lost their jobs, and some of them were imprisoned because they had been in contact with him,” explains Baron Cohen, who discovered while researching Cohen that the spy had used the same method he himself followed in creating Morad.
“The similarity between Morad and Eli Cohen is that if you create a character, there has to be a complete backstory. For Erran Morad I stole the military history of a real Israeli soldier and learned to imitate it verbally so that I could talk about it for half an hour. And when Vice-President Cheney took me aside and asked me to tell him about my military history and my service, I was able to talk about it in detail for half an hour. Then you realise that the amazing thing about Eli Cohen is that he was the greatest method actor of all time. He had a fake persona that nobody saw through for years. Daniel Day-Lewis won Oscars for staying in a fictional character for a few months. Cohen managed it for years, and nobody caught him because he slipped up somewhere. He was caught because of his radio transmissions.”
From Ali G to General Aladeen
Baron Cohen was born in London in 1971 to a Jewish family. He was passionate about acting from childhood, and after graduating from Cambridge University in 1993 he worked briefly as a model before finding work presenting local television programmes. In 1998 he appeared on a Channel 4 comedy show as Ali G, an uneducated white wannabe rapper from Staines, near London, who conducts bizarre and satirical interviews with politicians and celebrities who believe he is a real journalist.
Ali G quickly became a famous and much-loved character in Britain, winning Baron Cohen many awards and making him one of Britain’s most important comedians.
After Ali G came Borat Sagdiyev, a backward, misogynist and anti-Semitic Kazakh journalist who starred in a film named after him, touring the United States and meeting Americans whose ideas were as naive, backward, racist and anti-Semitic as his own.
He followed it with Brüno Gehard, a gay Austrian fashion presenter who led the people he interviewed into provocative statements and embarrassing behaviour.
And in 2012, after the Arab Spring erupted, he released The Dictator, in which he played Admiral General Aladeen, ruler of a fictional country called Wadiya, who risks his life to keep democracy from reaching the country he lovingly oppresses.
What is remarkable is that Baron Cohen managed to fool so many politicians, celebrities and other public figures in Britain and the United States, and none of them suspected him, despite his provocations and the bizarre, preposterous behaviour of his alter egos.
“That’s what drew me to Eli Cohen,” says Baron Cohen. “But I do it without risking my life. I’m undercover, trying to live the character, do a good job and make sure the person I’m with doesn’t realise that I’m not a gay Austrian fashion designer or an aspiring rapper from Staines. I don’t think people like being fooled. What we can learn from it is that Cohen was a brilliant actor, and I don’t think many people could have pulled it off. That’s why he was so trusted that he was offered the post of deputy defence minister.”
Baron Cohen has always made a habit of appearing in disguise as his characters in the media and at social and film events. In 2012, the Academy threatened to bar him from the Oscars if he came as General Aladeen; he arrived on the red carpet in character anyway. He used to refuse to give interviews as himself and insisted on speaking through his alter egos, to promote the message he wanted them to carry. When I met Aladeen in New York, the dictator stayed in character from start to finish. The question is: what was he trying to achieve with these characters?
“Very early on, when I was 23, I created Borat and realised that people could talk to him and strip themselves bare. Not literally: they would reveal themselves in a way you don’t see even in a documentary. So originally Borat wasn’t a comic character. He was a way of getting people to show who they really are, the side you can never see on screen. Many of the characters I’ve created work in different ways. But the aim of some of them is to get people to reveal their truth, to show their levels of hatred and racism or even their good side. Some characters show how patient, polite and compassionate people are. It depends on who the person revealing themselves to the character is.”
A million dollars for Syria
Beyond his work, Baron Cohen is also active in charity, though he keeps it out of sight, with one exception: in 2015 he gave $1 million to help Syrian refugees and vaccinate their children against measles.
“I noticed there was very little outrage or political interest when Bashar al-Assad started killing his own people. I was very upset about it. I tried to call journalists I knew to cover it, and it turned out I didn’t know many news journalists. But nobody covered that story, and nobody at the United Nations or in Parliament talked about it. It took years before the British Parliament voted to take a position, and even Obama stayed silent. I was getting more and more worried. I called some charities to find out what could be done. It turned out to be very cheap: hundreds of thousands of children ended up being vaccinated, and it didn’t cost much per person. And I was thinking, why isn’t anyone else giving money? At one point the charity asked me: could you announce your donation? In the end we realised that the solution had nothing to do with charities. It was political.”
Baron Cohen has proved that you don’t need to be a Mossad spy to deceive or con people. He won the trust and the secrets of people in important political and social positions by disguising himself as characters who behave like them or share their views, which is exactly what Eli Cohen did with Syria’s leaders. Anyone who wants to be a successful spy has to be a brilliant actor.
More on UKScreen
Most read on UKScreen
- A Cannes Master Made a Film With No Actors or Crew. Only His Vision Survived
- What Was Russell Brand Truly Punished For?
- Trump Survived His Scandals. So Who Wanted Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Gone?
- Ellison’s Empire Sends Hollywood a Message About Israel
- The Wachowski siblings (formerly brothers) seek the meaning of life in Cloud Atlas
Get the best of UKScreen by email
New stories, reviews and interviews from the archive, straight to your inbox.
1 Comment
Comments are closed.