Sacha Baron Cohen says his first for-hire movie, the 2006 comedy Talladega Nights, came with a surprise he couldn’t comprehend: a bed in his trailer. He’d never had a trailer before.
“I realised I’d never been in a trailer before, and I go, ‘Hold on, this is a paid job where I can go to sleep?!‘ I couldn’t comprehend how relatively easy it was, and it was great fun.”
That kind of conventional acting job is something he describes as carrying “absolutely zero risk.” Cohen says a 3-month shoot on Netflix’s Ladies First paid as well as projects that consume years of his life.
Now he’s returned to Ali G with a movie built around 3 characters.
“I want to give the fans who’ve been loyal for the last 28 years something that they’ve never seen before,” Cohen said. “I want to give them the most ambitious movie I’ve ever made, which is a three-character movie.”
In Ali G: Who Iz I?, his roles include Ali G and a former Mossad agent. Cohen calls the project “my version of the Avengers.”
Asked about his appetite for difficult work, he said: “There must be some masochistic nature to me, but I don’t think it’s just that.”