Why the FBI Thought Sacha Baron Cohen Might Be a Terrorist During the Filming of ‘Borat’
· Vice
Critical and commercial success aside, 2006’s Borat sounds like it caused nothing but problems for Sacha Baron Cohen.
For starters, the film’s original director, Todd Phillips, stepped down after shooting the famous rodeo scene in which Borat sings the Kazakhstani national anthem. According to the Daily Mail, Phillips and Cohen had to flee the Salem Civic Center where the sequence was filmed because angry locals were firing their guns in the air. Phillips and other members of the production team also reportedly received death threats over the stunt.
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Borat also spawned a fair number of lawsuits, and Cohen was specifically named in a couple of them. Michael Psenicska, who gave Borat a driving lesson in the movie, sued Cohen and 20th Century Fox, claiming that he thought he was being filmed for a documentary. Etiquette teacher Kathie Martin similarly accused Cohen and the producers of tricking her.
Both suits were eventually dismissed.
‘Borat’ Caused So Many Problems the FBI Eventually Got Involved
But that wasn’t the only trouble Cohen got into with the law thanks to Borat. “There was a time, you know, I got so used to the police turning up,” Cohen told NPR in 2012. “You know, with Borat, I think they came about 45 times,” he continued. “Sometimes it was the police, then the FBI were following us for a while. They had so many complaints that there was a Middle Eastern man … driving through America in an ice cream van, that the FBI assigned a team to us.”
While appearing on WTF with Marc Maron a few years later, Cohen revealed that he was able to dodge the feds on at least one occasion. As he tells it, the bureau kept a file on the filmmakers because of the numerous complaints they’d received. Eventually, they decided to visit Cohen and the rest of the crew at a hotel they were staying in during production. “I obviously went missing when I heard because [the film crew] were like, ‘FBI’s downstairs. Sacha, disappear,’” the actor recalled.
This is all in addition to the Secret Service showing up while Cohen was filming in the Washington, D.C. area. In an interview with The Guardian from 2007, Cohen said the government agents believed he and his co-star, Ken Davitian, were al-Qaida, “since why else would two guys be driving around the White House in an ice cream truck?”
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