The first thing you should know is that I love, adore and worship Sacha Baron Cohen and have this fantasy whereby we get married and set up home in Notting Hill as a power couple and when the phone rings and it’s Richard Branson I will say, ‘I’m so sorry, Dick, but we can’t come to Necker Island next week as we’ve promised to go away with Charles and Nigella. We know, boring, but we can’t cancel them again.’
Baron Cohen is, I believe, the greatest comic film-maker working today, and although The Dictator is not up there with Borat, or even his Ali G television persona, as it’s so much broader and more familiar, I would not allow this to come between us. ‘Sacha,’ I would say to him at the breakfast table, ‘pass the toast.’ As my mother always told me, ‘If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all,’ and although I have based a career on doing the exact opposite, I would make an exception in this instance.
Unlike Borat and Brüno, The Dictator does not, sadly, depend on Baron Cohen ambushing real people, as it is, instead, a narrative fiction; it has a story and sticks to it.
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