The man behind The Dictator’s beard
The Dictator meets the media devils
“Welcome, devils of the Zionist media.”
Admiral General Aladeen, the fictional dictator of the fictional African nation of Wadiya, is addressing the world’s press in the ballroom of the Waldorf-astoria hotel. He’s dressed in a uniform of extravagant gold epaulettes and numerous battle ribbons, standing in front of posters of himself, on a rug adorned with the shapes of people having sex in various positions.
The Admiral General is guarded by six beautiful women wearing short skirts and carrying submachine guns, part of a corps of what he calls “25 female virgin guards who protect me at all times. I know they are virgins because I have their virginity checked every night by the head of my penis.”
Yes, Sacha Baron Cohen is back in town. He’s hiding in there somewhere, behind the character’s lavish beard and vaguely Middle Eastern accent. Aladeen is the hero of The Dictator, the new film from a performer — “actor” seems too limited — whose art is to dive into a provocative persona and push it to the limits of its discomfort.
Baron Cohen developed his style on British TV’S Da Ali G Show, and then took it to the movies. He has been Borat, the simpleminded racist from Kazakhstan, and Bruno, the gay fashion icon from Austria, in two ambush films that used guerrilla street theatre to expose common attitudes to exaggerated stereotypes.
Now, in The Dictator, Baron Cohen is assuming a new alter ego: an anti-semitic tyrant who believes in both rape and nuclear weapons. He comes to New York to address the United Nations and somehow winds up working in an organic health-food store in Brooklyn and falling for a leftwing lesbian do-gooder. It’s a rare scripted starring role — Baron Cohen is now too famous to delude the public with his realityshow ambushes — but he can’t let go of his obsession with impersonation.
So with no man on the street to fool, Baron Cohen is now playing to the band: It’s movie promotion as performance art. He is market- ing The Dictator by appearing in character as Admiral General Aladeen on TV shows (including a stint on Saturday Night Live) and now, in front of several hundred reporters who have been recruited as part of the gag. They have been asked to submit questions for The Dictator in advance, and ask them at the news conference. There’s a teleprompter on the stage, as well.
We play along, partly because everybody wants to get into the act, but also because it’s the only way to get close enough to get the story. Baron Cohen will not do straight interviews, and so the details of his life (he’s married to actress Isla Fisher, with whom he has two daughters, and lives in Los Angeles and London) and his fascinating family (his brother Erran is a composer who wrote the music for The Dictator; his cousin Simon is the world’s foremost researcher on autism) are part of what must remain hidden behind the beard.
You learn about him from hints. Ben Kingsley, who plays Aladeen’s right-hand man, says Baron Cohen is totally different from what he is playing.
“The man he’s playing cares little for his country, less for his people, and holds most of the rest of the world in utter contempt,” Kingsley said in a more traditional news conference earlier in the day. The dictator is “the polar opposite of Sacha Baron Cohen, who has a massive humanitarian heart.”
The Dictator arrives near the end of the Arab Spring (“one of the great tragedies of our time,” the Admiral General calls it), a bit of prescience, considering that the preparation for the film began two years before the start of the democracy movement.
He began the press event by saying, “I want to thank the United Nations for their brave inaction over Syria. Thirteen months and still no Security Council resolution. You guys are amazing. You have done next to nothing for the Syrian people, but remember, you can always do less.”
He waved goodbye to the journalists.
“As you write good reviews, your families will be released,” he said.