‘Borat’ Director Says Sacha Baron Cohen Became Too Hollywood Following Film’s Success

Larry Charles says that The Dictator wasn’t as good as Borat because Sacha Baron Cohen started taking too much advice from the A-list entertainment business crowd instead of following his comedic instincts. Was Pamela Anderson their Yoko Ono?

As a veteran comedy writer, director and producer, Charles’ fingerprints are all over American humor, but for all his work on seminal projects like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, his most significant influence on contemporary comedy might just come from his time directing Baron Cohen in Borat, Bruno and The Dictator. The duo’s rebellious, revolutionary, in-your-face style of comedy filmmaking inspired countless other renegade, gonzo comics to go out in the world and test their chaotic characters out on unsuspecting strangers, but according to Charles’ recent comments, following the success of Borat and projects like it, Baron Cohen shifted his focus from transgressive trailblazing to traditional show business BS years ago.

During a recent talk with The Daily Beast, Charles explained how his relationship with Baron Cohen broke down during the making of their last joint project, The Dictator, which premiered back in 2012 to more muted praise than their previous films. According to Charles, Baron Cohen was “moving away” from the Borat-style comedy that made him an icon in hopes of becoming “more of a traditional movie star,” leading to a final collaboration that was only good instead of Aladeen.

In the interview, Charles heaped praise on the talent of his former star, lauding Baron Cohen as even better than many of comedy’s all-time greats. “He was a comic genius, he really was, when he was doing those characters,” Charles gushed. “There was nobody in the history of show business from Charlie Chaplin to Peter Sellers and anybody in between who did the kind of things that Sacha was doing.”

“It was really unprecedented, and I was very impressed with it, and I would have done anything for him,” Charles added, although the honeymoon period in one of comedy’s great partnerships wouldn’t last forever. “By the time we got to The Dictator he was pulling away from that whole style of work and he wanted to be more of a traditional movie star,” lamented Charles.

Charles said of Baron Cohen’s behavior during the making of The Dictator, “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.”

However, Charles defended his final collaboration with Baron Cohen, saying of The Dictator, “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.”

Of course, a few years after The Dictator drew lukewarm reviews and seemed to signify the end of an era, Baron Cohen would return to the “rebel sensibility” Charles identified in him, sans Charles. Baron Cohen’s Trump-era mockumentary series Who Is America? was hit with audiences and critics, as was the 2020 Borat sequel Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

But despite the sequel’s success, and before speaking favorably of everyone involved with Borat 2, Charles maintained that some masterpieces don’t need a second installment. “The first Borat was magic. I didn’t want to touch the legacy of that movie,” Charles said of his long-time feelings about turning Borat into a full-on film franchise. “To try to recreate that magic felt cynical to me, and usually does with sequels.”

Hopefully that means we’ll never have to suffer through Bill Maher in Religulous 2.