‘Borat’ Director Says Sacha Baron Cohen Sold Out His “Comedic Genius” to Hollywood

I started to notice it not long after “The Dictator” came out, Sacha Baron Cohen’s raw, guerrilla-style comedy was starting to wane.

Cohen was a comedy revolutionary in the 2000s with “Da A Ali G Show,” “Borat” and “Brüno.” Back then, Cohen was hailed as a genius, the kind of force that changed humor forever. But somewhere between the laughs and production meetings for “The Dictator,” that fearless spark began to flicker.

I remember thinking, this isn’t the same guy who once slipped into dangerous, improvised encounters with total strangers. Instead of charging forward into uncomfortable truths, it felt like he was pulling back.

That creative direction didn’t go unnoticed by “Borat” director Larry Charles. In an interview with The Daily Beast, he explains how “The Dictator” started with real satirical ambitions—“Dr. Strangelove, layered, plotted”—but quickly unraveled as Sacha shifted to more conventional celebrity territory.

He was surrounding himself with more traditional show business people and getting advice from them, which I don’t think was good advice for the kind of rebel sensibility that Sacha had had up until that time. And so, for a variety of reasons, it started to kind of fragment and fracture and fall apart. And the movie’s not bad. It’s good. It’s funny. There’s actually a lot of funny stuff in it, but it just didn’t reach the potential that it had.

Meetings felt scripted; creative instincts diluted by outside voices. Instead of trusting the character—Aladeen, a rich, brutal dictator riffing on Gaddafi—Cohen was trusting advisors, PR executives, box-office analysts.

I would try to get [Cohen] to trust himself, trust his instincts, which I’ve learned is the only thing you have. And instead, he was trusting so many different people with so many different contradictory thoughts that it started to just unravel and issues arose that should never have been issues.

By the time “The Dictator” wrapped, something had snapped. Charles says the “comedic genius” he knew was gone, they fell out over the direction of the project—and that Cohen’s star turn, his celebrity mindset, pulled him away from the very subversion he once embodied.

I still love Cohen — his early work changed my brain. But there’s no getting around it: after “The Dictator,” the edge dulled. We lost the man who used comedy as a weapon, a mirror, a provocation. The one who didn’t care about comfort or image. And the loss feels permanent now.