Sacha Baron Cohen reveals hilarious Ali G anecdote from Shaggy 'Me Julie' video
He also described the most awkward scene to film in Borat
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Sacha Baron Cohen has been busily promoting his latest film Grimsby all over the world, talking about all the various characters he has played over the course of his life.
One of the most famous is Ali G, who he resurrected for the Oscars earlier this year. In an Ask Me Anything segment for Reddit, the infamous comedian wrote about the time he appeared in a music video with Shaggy.
“One interesting story there was Shaggy's manager said to me, the director, brought us up to his villa and said ‘Listen, I've cast Me Julie.’ And we said ‘No no no, don't worry about that, we've actually cast Me Julie, we found her in London and brought her to Jamaica.’ And he said ‘No no no, you see that woman over there?’
"We look over and see a semi-naked woman in his bed. He goes ‘That is Me Julie. What time should she be on set?’ And we said ‘No, we don't want her on set.’ And he reached into his trousers and pulled out a gun, put it on the table, and said ‘What time should she come?’ And we said "9:00. 9:00 in the morning is great,’ but if you look at the video now, you see there's a woman who gets hit in the head with a soccer ball, and that was the girl.
“That was my own revenge that if this guy had forced me to cast this woman, she'd get smacked in the head with a soccer ball 15 times for every take.”
In the same AMA he revealed the worst part of filming Borat was the naked fight: “Because I had a 250 lb. man's ass on my face, and his buttocks was so big that I couldn't actually breathe when I was underneath there.
“So, I had about 30 seconds of air under there before I had to breathe in. And I had a signal with the director, which was when I thought I was going to pass out, I would hit the mattress three times. If you look at the Borat film now, you will see that I do hit the mattress three times, and the director didn't stop filming, which meant I was faced with this very stark choice, which was either to die, or to breathe in the rancid air from my costar's rectum. And when I was underneath there, I decided to die.
“Luckily, my co-star moved off and I managed to finish the scene. Otherwise, that would have been a very inglorious end to my life.”
Cohen recently revealed the reason he backed out of the Freddy Mercury biopic, saying that the remaining members of Queen wanted to produce a ‘legacy project’.
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