Sacha Baron Cohen - The Real Borat - Finally Speaks

Two Escalades stop in the middle of Sixty-Fifth Street on the West Side of Manhattan. Out of the front SUV, a tall, awkward mustachioed man in an ill-fitting blue-gray suit emerges. In the past month, through a series of press stunts, interviews, news events and blanket advertising, this man has turned himself into a household name in America: Borat.

It is Halloween, the night of a thousand living Borats roaming our city streets in costumed adulation of the spurious Kazakh journalist, but this Borat is the real thing. A throng of movie publicists, photographers, collaborators and assistants close in around him as he heads toward the escalators that lead up to the Walter Reade Theater, where an advance screening of his American cinematic debut is about to start. He pauses at the foot of the escalator, turns to me and extends a hand. "Hi," he says, in a deep, genteel British accent that I've never heard emerge from this mustachioed visage, despite having watched every minute of available footage he has recorded. "I'm Sacha."

And with this one word -- "Sacha" -- he informs me that I am being let behind the Kazakh curtain, into the mind of the man behind the buffoon, into the very private world of England's most popular enigma, Sacha Baron Cohen.

Since reaching star status in Britain in 1998 with his other alter ego, the wangsta jester Ali G, Baron Cohen has never done an interview in his home country as himself and has never done an interview this extensive anywhere. Even when promoting his supporting role in the Will Ferrell Nascar parody, Talladega Nights, the Sacha Baron Cohen he presented to the press was still a character: typical of either a pretentious British thespian or a really stupid bystander who didn't understand any of their questions. A shorter, shaven-headed man chases after Borat. "Your hair," he mouths, as he reaches him and adjusts the tangle of black curls on his head. This man is Jason Alper, who has designed all of Baron Cohen's costumes and will later tonight accidentally steal his shoes.

After pausing for paparazzi in his usual pose -- shit-eating grin, elbows pressed against his sides and two thumbs up -- Borat heads into the theater and introduces Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

"At first, Kazakh censors wouldn't let me release this movie because of anti-Semitism," he tells the assemblage. "But then they decided that there was just enough."

What follows is one of the greatest comedies of the last decade and perhaps even a whole new genre of film. It features just four actual actors (and a male porn star found to portray Borat's teenage son, Huey Lewis); the rest of the cast consists of real people Borat encounters while traveling across the country in pursuit of Pamela Anderson -- each one an unwitting actor propelling forward his Don Quixote-like quest (Anderson was in on the joke). If you've been anywhere near a television or newspaper in the last month, you know the story. Chances are you've already seen it. Maybe even twice.

After the screening, Borat returns to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to shower and transform back into Sacha Baron Cohen: mild-mannered Londoner, fiance of actress Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers), reluctant sometime resident of Los Angeles. I wait outside the restaurant Asiate for him to appear. I'd met Baron Cohen once before, three years ago, when he was recording his first series of Da Ali G Show for HBO, interviewing a panel of leading scientists as pseudo hip-hop youth talk-show host Ali G. ("Let's talk about when technology goes horribly wrong: Could there be another Nintendo 64?") At the time, our interview resulted in answers like this one: "When me came out me mum's poom poom bush, me immediately started crying in a junglistic riddim. Me first word was 'ho.' "

This interview promises to be different....