Rise to Fame
A fake hip-hop journalist who interviewed real politicians and got them to say embarrassing things on camera was always going to work somewhere. It worked on The 11 O'Clock Show in 1998, earned a BAFTA in 2001, and then Borat happened. The 2006 mockumentary opened at #1 in the US, won him a Golden Globe for Best Actor, and landed an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Almost no one in the film was in on the joke. That level of commitment isn't a technique, it's a threat.
In the Spotlight
Now he's in the MCU. He played Mephisto in Marvel's Ironheart in 2025, and Kevin Feige has flagged the character as a major villain in the next phase. That's a notable pivot for someone who built his name ambushing real politicians with a fake hip-hop journalist. A new untitled scripted comedy is shopping for a studio home after Universal couldn't fit it into their 2026 schedule. He and Isla Fisher finalized their divorce in 2025, with press calling it a '$75 million split.' The MCU and the mockumentary format have almost nothing in common, which makes it perfect casting.
Side Notes
The weird math of his career: he's a Cambridge history graduate who wrote his thesis on Jewish civil rights activists, spent a year on an Israeli kibbutz as a teenager, and speaks fluent Hebrew. Borat's anti-Semitic monologues were delivered in Hebrew with a fake accent. His first TV appearance was as a cellist, not a comedian. His cousin Simon Baron-Cohen is one of the world's leading autism researchers. He spent years at Cambridge studying antisemitism academically, then built a career using it as a mirror to make audiences uncomfortable about their own reflexes.