Even Sacha Baron Cohen’s wife says he can be difficult to live with when ‘in character’ on a film set.
And now the Cambridge-educated British star behind characters such as Ali G and Borat is embroiled in a Hollywood feud over his alleged behaviour, in a clash of egos between two intensely committed yet very different big screen performers.
n actress Rebel Wilson, his co-star in 2016 movie flop Grimsby, has gone public with accusations about his antics – branding him a ‘massive a**hole’ and accusing him of trying to block her forthcoming memoir.
She has been no stranger to controversy herself, fighting defamation cases and boasting about a stunt which took aback another British actor Tom Hardy.
Both Wilson, 44, and 52-year-old Baron Cohen – said by his wife Isla Fisher to obsessively bring his characters such as Borat and The Dictator home with him – have traded claims and counter-claims eight years after they worked together.
Rebel Wilson has spoken out about a co-star she branded a ‘massive a**hole’ as she prepares to bring out her new memoir Rebel Rising
Sacha Baron Cohen and his actress wife Isla Fisher, pictured here at a screening of the Oscars in Sydney in April 26, have been married since 2010
Rebel Wilson, centre, and Sacha Baron Cohen, right, appeared together in 2016 movie alongside Mark Strong, left
Rebel Wilson and Isla Fisher were pictured together at the Los Angeles premiere of the film Bacholerette in August 2012
Former Home And Away star Fisher told ITV show Lorraine in 2016: ‘Obviously the kids get very confused – when they were tiny and The Dictator would be holding Elula, it was very strange.
‘You have to live with the handlebar moustaches, the mohawks – you live with everything, the costumes.’
She has also said: ‘I cannot tell you how embarrassing he is in social situations – to him, there’s no difference between the awkward gaffes he deliberately makes as a comic and the terrible faux pas he innocently commits as my husband.
‘I would like to think Sacha is putting in rehearsal time for all those hilarious gaffes his characters make in movies. But I’m by no means certain that’s why he does it – I don’t think he can help himself.’
Baron Cohen, born in Hammersmith in west London, was educated at private schools before reading history at Cambridge, including a focus on anti-Semitism.
During his time at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he wrote his thesis on the role of Jewish activists in the US civil rights movement.
Wilson also went to an independent school, Tara Anglican School for Girls in Sydney, where she was a boarder before graduating from the University of New South Wales in 2009 with Bachelor of Arts (Theatre and Performance Studies) and Bachelor of Laws degrees.
She initially wanted to work as a lawyer before opting for a career in acting, first studying at the n Theatre for Young People then moving to the US where she trained with the Second City improvisational comedy troupe in New York.
Fisher, 48, also appeared alongside her husband in critically-panned Grimsby – released in the US with the name The Brothers Grimsby – though it was Wilson playing his character Nobby’s girlfriend Dawn, mother of their 11 children.
Wilson has previously spoken about bad experiences with an actor she did not identify but who prompted her to adopt a new ‘no a**holes’ approach when choosing projects to work on.
She went on to say she had faced legal action over comments about a difficult working ordeal, ahead of her memoir Rebel Rising’s release next week.
And she has now told her followers online: ‘I wrote about an a**hole in my book. Now, said a**hole is trying to threaten me.
‘He’s hired a crisis PR manager and lawyers. He is trying to stop press coming out about my book. But the book will come out and you will all know the truth.’
She said of ahead of her book’s publication: ‘I worked with a massive a**hole, and, yeah, now I definitely have a no-a**holes policy. Chapter one said a**hole — it is chapter 23, that guy was a massive a**hole.’
Baron Cohen and Wilson played boyfriend and girlfriend Nobby and Dawn in the film Grimsby, released in the US as The Brothers Grimsby – including this scene shot in Cape Town
Isla Fisher has previously told the Lorraine show how her husband Sacha Baron Cohen confuses their three children when he comes home as one of his controversial characters
Isla joked that one of Sacha’s characters The Dictator was particularly confusing for their middle child, daughter Elula – he appeared in the role in the film back in 2012
Rebel Wilson has accused Baron Cohen of trying to block her new memoir Rebel Rising
She later posted: ‘I will not be silenced by high priced lawyers or PR crisis managers. The a**hole I am talking about in one chapter of my book is Sacha Baron Cohen.’
He has since hit back, with a spokesperson for him rejecting what they called ‘these demonstrably false claims’.
They said Wilson’s allegations were ‘directly contradicted by extensive detailed evidence, including contemporaneous documents, film footage, and eyewitness accounts from those present before, during and after the production of Grimsby.’
The film cost £27.7million to make but only recouped £22.2million, according to Box Office Mojo, and has a rating of just 36 per cent on reviews site Rotten Tomatoes.
Wilson had already made some eyebrow-raising claims about Baron Cohen’s approach on set during filming of Grimsby.
She alleged at the time he persistently encouraged her to strip off for a sex scene and also to stick her finger up his bottom.
Wilson told the Kyle and Jackie O on ‘s Kiis FM in October 2014: ‘Sacha is so outrageous. Every single day he’s like, “Rebel, can you just go naked in this scene?” And I’m like, “No!”
‘Sacha and I have the same agent in America and I’m like, “Sacha, I’m going to call our agent Sharon and tell her how much you are harassing me”.
‘Every day he’s like, “Just go naked, it will be funny. Remember in Borat when I did that naked scene? It was hilarious.”
‘On the last day I thought I’d obviously won the argument and he got a body double to do the naked scene.
‘Then in the last scene he was like, “Rebel can you just stick your finger up my butt?” And I went, “What do you mean Sacha? That’s not in the script.”
‘And he’s like, “Look, I’ll just pull down my pants, you just stick your finger up my butt – it’ll be a really funny bit.”‘
She described suggesting a compromise, adding: ‘You don’t wanna be a diva so I … said, “I’ll slap you once on the butt and that’s it”.’
Sacha Baron Cohen rose to fame playing Staines-based ‘white suburban male’ Ali G
Sacha Baron Cohen broke his silence on Monday after Rebel Wilson claimed he is the ‘a**hole’ she refers to in her explosive new memoir
He and Isla Fisher, here attending a screening of the Oscars in Sydney in April 2021, have been married since 2010 following a six-year engagement
Rebel Wilson has made allegations about Sacha Baron Cohen’s behaviour making Grimsby
Baron Cohen is known for his uncompromising commitment to playing characters such as spoof interviewers Ali G and Borat, who have duped celebrities including US politicians Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani.
In the 2006 film Borat he and co-star Ken Davitian are seen having a lengthy naked fight which involved brawling in a hotel room and then running through hotel corridors and conference rooms.
Baron Cohen said during a Reddit AMA while promoting Grimsby: ‘I only ever really do something if I find it hysterically funny.
‘And I have a mental problem, which is I don’t see the consequences of my actions.
‘So, I will often come up with something in the writers room, with me and my colleague, and not really think through how I’ll feel when I get to the day when I have to shoot it.
‘So, case in point, the naked fight seemed very very funny when I started talking about it in the writers room.
‘But it got to the day and when I was confronted with a naked 260lb man, who had not cleaned his a***hole for 25 years, the joke suddenly did not seem very funny.’
Baron Cohen and Fisher – who have been married since 2010 following a six-year engagement – are the proud parents of daughters Olive, 16, and Elula, 13, and nine-year-old son Montgomery.
Isla helped her husband smuggle in an Ali G costume when he reprised the character on-stage to present a prize at the Oscars in 2016.
She later recalled how he told her: ‘I want to sneak in and do Ali G but I can’t find any of the costume on my body because they’re gonna put me through metal detectors and be ultra suspicious.
Rebel Wilson has named British actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen as the celebrity responsible for making threats over her no-holds-barred memoir, Rebel Rising
Her latest Instagram post came two days after the Pitch Perfect star alleged that a celebrity she had worked with was threatening her over the release of the memoir
Over a picture of a writing pad and pen, the comedian said that she ‘wrote about an a**hole’ in her book and ‘now they are trying to threaten me’
Baron Cohen’s other characters include fictional Kazakh journalist Borat
‘Sweetie, will you fit giant yellow glasses, a hat, a glove, and a beard inside your Spanx?’
They then locked themselves in a bathroom so he could transform himself into Ali G.
His new nemesis Wilson has also been the subject of controversy.
In an echo of one of her allegations about Baron Cohen, she once admitted to sticking her finger up the bottom of The Revenant and Dunkirk star Hardy.
During an appearance on US chat show Jimmy Kimmel live in May 2019, she said about her film The Hustle: ‘My first day on set, the director said, “When you enter the scene I want you to just stick your finger up Tom Hardy’s butt”.
‘I just did it. He gave a really realistic shocked expression, and then he didn’t really talk to me. He was wearing pants, so I couldn’t go all the way up.’
She also told how while making the same film she suddenly grabbed another co-star Anne Hathaway’s breasts, adding: ‘Like, I should have told her about it.
‘If you’re going to touch somebody inappropriately, you have to tell them before the take and say, “Is it alright if I do this to you?”
‘But I forgot – maybe, like, deliberately forgot.’
Wilson, whose movies also include the Pitch Perfect series, won a defamation case in June 2017 against gossip magazine publisher Bauer Media Group.
A six-woman jury at the Supreme Court in Victoria in unanimously found eight articles published in Woman’s Day, n Women’s Weekly, NW and OK magazine in May 2015 defamed the star.
In Grimsby Wilson plays Cohen’s on-screen love interest Dawn (pictured), while the actor’s real-life love and fellow n actress Fisher plays Jodie Figgs
Wilson and Baron Cohen’s wife Isla Fisher previously co-starred in the 2012 film Bachelorette
Sacha Baron Cohen, dressed in character, and Isla Fisher are seen here attending Grimsby’s world premiere in 2016
She had been accused of lying about her age and of being related to Walt Disney.
The court ordered Bauer to pay her A$4.5million (£2.3million) in damages although this was later reduced on appeal to A$600,000 (£310,000).
The following August she then privately settled a defamation suit filed against her by a journalist she misidentified and called ‘total scum’ on Twitter.
Wilson agreed to pay Elizabeth Wilson, a senior features editor at House and Garden, $120,000 after incorrectly shaming her for ‘harassing’ the actress’ grandmother.