Hi everyone and thank you for tuning in to the 254th episode of Awards Chatter, The Hollywood Reporters Awards Podcasts, which is now

but one of four podcasts that comprise the Hollywood Reporters Podcast Network, the others being

it happened in Hollywood, behind the screen, and TV's top five. I'm the host of

Awards Chatter Scott Feinberg and my guest today is one of the most

revolutionary figures in the history of comedy. A British actor who, some 20 years ago, began creating

outlandish characters and then taking them out into the world to interact with

unsuspecting people, something that really hadn't been done before. He has continued to do so ever

since, all the while very rarely giving interviews as himself, this conversation

being a notable exception, the incomparable Sasha Baron Cohen.

Cohen's work has reached an ever expanding audience since his start on local TV in the

UK. After serving as a contributor to Channel 4's version of The Daily Show, the 11 o'clock show, on which he debuted in 1998,

he left to create and star on the Ali G show, which ran on Channel 4 for one season in 2000, and then two seasons on

HBO from 2003 through 2004, and then made a variety of feature films centered on

the characters for which he first became famous.

Ali G, a white Brit posing as a gangster,

Borat Sagdeiev, a Kazakh TV personality dispatched to America,

and Bruno, a gay Austrian fashion enthusiast

respectively in 2002's Ali G. into house 2006's Borat cultural

learnings of America for make benefit glorious Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, for which

Cohen was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, and won a best actor in a

musical or comedy Golden Globe, and 2009's Bruno. He also made an entirely scripted film about another character, General

Al-Adeen, a dictator of a North African country who winds up in America, in 2012's The Dictator.

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