Sacha Baron Cohen: I’m 23 Percent Gay (but It Fluctuates)

Leave it to Sacha Baron Cohen to say things that will make you tilt your head and squint your eyes in puzzlement.

The actor has taken on a number of memorable roles (you remember Borat, Bruno, Ali G, right?), and his dedication to each personality almost made it seem as though these characters were real people, which is great, except we then forget that Cohen is his own man, too.

Luckily, during an appearance on WTF! podcast with Marc Maron to promote his upcoming film The Brothers Grimsby, we were able to get to know Sacha Baron Cohen a little better, thanks to the celeb revealing some (very) interesting facts.

For example, when asked if he’s gay, Cohen (who is married to actress Isla Fisher) responded, “I’m 23 percent gay. We worked it out did the calculations. I’m 23 percent gay,” but added that the number tends to fluctuate. “There are times I go down to 17 sometimes I’m 31 depends on the situation. When I was doing Borat and I had the testicles at my chin I was at 31.”

But that wasn’t the only note-worthy remark from Sacha.

While speaking about Borat, Cohen revealed that the FBI started investigating him because people began getting suspicious. “On Borat the FBI started following us,” he noted. “They got so many complaints that there was a terrorist traveling in an ice-cream van…that they started compiling a file on us.”

Speaking of the law, it turns out the star has hired someone whose job is to specifically keep him out of jail. Seriously.

“We hire a kind of bodyguard. He’s bit like [Grimsby’s] Nobby actually. He’s this northern bloke, and his job is to prevent me from being arrested,” he explains.

“There’s a bit in Bruno where I end up drunk with my assistant, and we wake up in this hotel room. We’re chained together in all this extreme S&M gear, there’s feces on the walls…it’s disgusting. We call down, and I get the manager up.”

This caused the hotel manager to call the police, and that’s when Sacha’s special bodyguard takes action.

“We always have an escape van waiting in an alleyway. He unlocked us [from the chains], we start running to the service elevator, get in the service elevator, the doors are closing—suddenly the hotel security open the doors, and they say ‘Get out, we’ve got the police downstairs’… We run away from them, start running down the stairs—we’re only on the 17th floor—and I’m in a G-string. I’m like, ‘Where are we going? There’s cops downstairs.’ And he says, ‘Out the window!'”

He continues, “So I look out the window and there’s a rickety old fire escape,” but, of course, there’s no key for the ladder at the end of the fire escape, so they had to jump at least 12 feet.

“There are two little American ladies [on the pavement] who are having a little cigarette break, and there, from the heavens, appears me. I jump in front of them, wearing heels, and this crazy S&M stuff, and there’s my friend with a toilet brush in his mouth.”

Unfortunately, Baron Cohen landed so heavily he broke his foot and filming was shut down for three months, but he managed to get out of Kansas without getting in trouble with police, so…mission accomplished?

You can hear more from his interesting interview here.

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