Sacha Baron Cohen publicly apologizes to Kazakhstan over Borat

British actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has publicly apologized to the people of Kazakhstan for the Borat character, speaking on the podcast "Happy Sad Confused". The apology comes 20 years after the release of the 2006 comedy "Borat", which follows Borat Sagdiyev, a fictional Kazakh journalist who travels to the United States to make a documentary and ends up in a series of comic situations.

"I want to apologize to the people of Kazakhstan for the first time ever because Borat has got nothing to do with Kazakhstan," the actor said.

Origins of the character

Baron Cohen explained that he had first developed an earlier version of the character for the BBC, with a different name and Albanian nationality. The name and nationality later changed depending on which television channel was funding the show. He recalled telling producers that the original character belonged to the BBC and that he had a brand-new one, Alexi Krickler from Moldova.

He later picked Kazakhstan as a place "that no-one knows anything about", and stressed that he does not even know what a Kazakh accent sounds like.

He described the apology as his first for the character, although he has had to defend Borat since the film came out. In a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone, he said the joke was not on Kazakhstan but on people who could believe that the Kazakhstan he describes might exist.

Kazakhstan's changing attitude

In 2005, Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry threatened to sue Baron Cohen and claimed the show had been commissioned for political purposes to damage the international reputation of the country and its people. In 2006, shortly before the film's release, the authorities paid for a four-page advertising supplement in The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune promoting the country's achievements in the 21st century.

The film was not officially banned in Kazakhstan, but it was never shown in the country's cinemas after its world premiere. It also did not receive a theatrical distribution license in Russia.

Attitudes softened over time. In 2017, Czech tourists in Astana who walked around dressed as Borat received a small fine, which Baron Cohen himself offered to pay. In 2020, Kazakh Tourism, the company responsible for promoting tourism in the country, adopted his catchphrase "Very nice!" as its official tourism slogan. Meanwhile, the Kazakh diaspora in the United States continued to oppose the sequel: in November 2020, the Kazakh American Association called for "Borat 2" to be excluded from Oscar, Golden Globe and other award nominations.