Originally appeared in Esquire Magazine July, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

Ash Baron Cohen’s father and his uncle — who is Sacha Baron Cohen’s father — were in the shmatte business together.

Our fathers were working-class Jews who were sent out of London during the blitz to Wales, where they went to school and were the only Jews in a completely non-Jewish environment. They learned quickly that they had to stand up for themselves. They were both creative rebels in many ways. And it probably has rubbed off on the two of us. I think Sash [rhymes with ash] and I are both very intrigued with the idea of mixing reality with perceptions of reality.

Baron Cohen arrived in Hollywood several years before his cousin. His first job was as a stand-in for Lou Ferrigno.

The only thing we had in common was we both have the same size hands. His calf muscle was the size of my head.

Baron Cohen financed his first student film by doing strip-a-grams.

I would have to show up in places in a cop’s outfit.

While in film school, he once convinced Richard Harris to do a cameo, for free, in a student production called The Sex Police. (You can watch the Harris clip on YouTube.)

I went to the Sunset Marquis to sneak into their pool. I was going to be confident, stride toward the pool, and take a few dives. As I walked in, I saw Richard Harris on his balcony. Very regal. That shock of white hair. He looked like King Arthur. So I picked up the house phone — I thought I’d just take a chance — and I asked for his suite. Then I heard this voice — “Who the fuck is this?” I said, “Look, I don’t know anyone in this town.” I asked for five minutes of his time. He said, “Be here at 7:00 A.M. tomorrow for breakfast.” So I was. I said, “I’m shooting a student film, would you consider doing a cameo?” He said, “Write me out a scene.” So I went home and for some reason I thought, I’ll write a scene about the etymology of the word cunt. Either he’s going to throw me out or he’s going to be intrigued. I came back the next day. He said, “Brilliant. Let’s shoot it tomorrow.” He was shooting Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood, and he said, “I told Clint I have food poisoning and can’t come to work today.” When we got back to his hotel that night, he called up Clint. He said, “I didn’t have food poisoning. I was with a young filmmaker, and we were running around on the beach. There were seven people there doing the whole thing, and even I was holding my own light.” He goes, “That was real filmmaking, Clint.”

Baron Cohen released his first feature film, Bang, about a woman who impersonates an LAPD officer, in 1997. Roger Ebert named it one of the year’s best. The director used a single name, Ash.

Was I trying to be cool, like Sting? Actually, I was trying not to be thrown out of the country. Originally, I was here illegally.

Oliver Stone saw the film and subsequently wrote a letter to the INS advocating citizenship for Baron Cohen.

After he saw Bang, Oliver says, “We’ve got to get you legal.” I think he said I reminded him of a young version of himself. The blond hair. The blue eyes. We’re very similar. To a person at the Braille Institute, we’re identical twins.

I’m legally blind without my contact lenses. I try to keep them in while I’m directing, because otherwise people wonder why I’m facing the wall and yelling, “Action!”

He has directed three feature films since 1995. His second, Pups, was sort of a teenage Dog Day Afternoon that starred a pre-O. C. Mischa Barton, wielding a gun. It was the first in a series of movies featuring strong, sexy women. This Girl’s Life, featuring James Woods and Rosario Dawson, was told from a female porn star’s point of view. (Dawson didn’t play the porn star.) He’s currently casting RadioActive, which has been described as a female Scarface.

Eats Roadkill, Speaks Danish.

The Appealingly Weird World of Viggo Mortensen

By Amy Wallace

Viggo Mortensen listens to a lot of AM radio. The forty-seven-year-old actor doesn’t enjoy this hobby, exactly. But if the vitriol spewed by conservative talk jocks is what tens of millions of Americans listen to, he figures he ought to listen, too. He just likes to hear what’s being said.

What was being said late last summer, however, was hard for him to take. In the dead of August, Cindy Sheehan had parked her beat-up motor home on a hot, dusty road outside of Crawford, Texas, not far from George W. Bush’s family compound. The California mother and former minister wanted to talk to the president about her son, Casey, a soldier who had been killed in Iraq. So she’d set up camp in the path of Bush’s motorcade and vowed to wait him out.

To Viggo (pronounced Vee-go), Sheehan sounded like the kind of person he admires: sincere, courageous, willing to question authority. But on the AM dial, she was getting flayed. Sean Hannity cast her as a nut job, an outcast from her own family, a bad mother. Bill O’Reilly called her “a radical who does not like her country.”

Viggo has a credo he lives by: Go see for yourself if you can. So he packed a bag, flew from Los Angeles to Dallas, rented a car, and drove ninety miles to Crawford. He came alone and without warning and — as he almost always does when meeting strangers — bearing gifts: fresh vegetables, some bottled water, and a copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

You might think that Sheehan’s spirits would have been lifted by the sight of Mortensen — his vivid blue eyes, his dimpled chin, square as the end of a two-by-four, his lean-as-beef-jerky frame. Instead, she blanched.

“It was weird for her,” Viggo says now, recalling her stricken face. Only later did he learn what had spooked her: One of the last things Cindy and her son had done together was see The Return of the King, the final film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy that turned Mortensen from a supporting player into a major star. So when she saw Viggo walking toward her, for a moment she saw only Lord Aragorn, exiled heir to the throne of Gondor. And in that same moment, she felt the presence of her dead son.

“I had no idea,” Viggo says. “I just wanted to talk to her, to see what she had to say.” Besides, he adds, “I figured Bush wasn’t going to come out anytime soon, so she probably could use something to read.”

*

Viggo bursts through the swinging front door of L.A.’s oldest Irish pub around 11:30 in the morning, wearing a faded blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt and no-nonsense gray pants that a plumber might wear to unclog a drain. To his weathered green jacket he’s affixed an American-flag lapel pin and a light-blue United Nations patch the size of a plum.

When I admire the patch, Viggo reaches into his pocket and gives me one. Then he points and enunciates every syllable: “U-ni-ted Na-tions.” He giggles — a surprisingly goofy laugh that sounds more Beavis and Butt-Head than leading man — and adds, “I think it’s a good idea.”

Since 1936, Tom Bergin’s Tavern has been the kind of friendly, worn-at-the-edges place that smells like sour beer, even now, before lunch. Green cardboard shamrocks are plastered to the walls, each bearing the name of a regular. You get steak fries with your fish and chips, and there’s Guinness on tap. Viggo orders both in a voice so quiet, the waitress and I both lean forward to hear.

He has arrived carrying a laptop computer, which he is immediately sheepish about. He is something of a Luddite. He likes to be barefoot, sometimes even at fancy Hollywood functions. Until recently, when he started watching soccer, the one television in his Venice, California, home was used solely to play movies. He carries no mobile phone.

“I’ve been portrayed as a cell-phoneless savage,” he says, not unhappily. But today he’s got something to show me: galleys of several books soon to be published by Perceval Press, a small company he owns. He flips open his PowerBook G4, shrugs, and says, “Anybody can be co-opted.”

What I’ve Learned

Originally published in Esquire,  January 1, 2006

Jerry Lewis: Comedian, 79, Las Vegas

INTERVIEWED BY: Amy Wallace

Hey, Penny! Forty-three years, Penny’s been in my office. She’s something else. She doesn’t let me get away with anything. Penny, bring me an orange soda, honey. You haven’t done a goddamn thing all day.

I will tell you about interviews: I’ve had them run from two and a half minutes to nine hours. Rarely anything in between. If I get to an interview and I can see they’re not that interested, I tell them, “Since the surgery, I get these heart spasms.” And they’re gone.

Everybody is nine years old. Starting with me.

You know what I’m going to be, don’t ya? The big eighty! Jesus Christ, that’s depressing.

I remember the night I first talked to Dean about wearing tuxedos in our act. He said, “Why a tux?” I said, “If you’re on the Bowery and see a guy in a street suit, if he falls down, you’d just say he’s drunk. But when you’re in a $1,500 tux and you hit the floor and come up with the dirt off the dance floor — that’s funny.” We never, either of us, performed again – ever — without a tux.

If you’re not nervous, you’re either a liar or a fool. But you’re not a professional.

I performed for six presidents. I met nine. One of my most prized possessions is a plaque Jack Kennedy gave me that says, “There are three things that are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two are beyond our comprehension, we must do the best we can with the third.”

I have some very personal feelings about politics, but I don’t get into it because I do comedy already.

Don’t come telling anybody they’re wrong until you can tell them how they can be right.

Adrenaline is wonderful. It covers pain. It covers dementia. It covers everything.

I used to fall because the fall worked. Because it paid off. And I had the best time. If you had told me that I would suffer from it years later, I would not have changed a thing.

Want a list? Diabetes. Pulmonary fibrosis. Bypass surgery — double. I had three surgeries on my spine. My spine is a joke. Every time I took a fall, my dad would say, “You’re going to pay for that one.” And he was right. So every time I get a new diagnosis, I think, Where did I get that one from?

I never got a formal education. So my intellect is my common sense. I don’t have anything else going for me. And my common sense opens the door to instinct.

Ego is necessary.

Penny! Do we have a photograph of the Ladies Man set?

I’ve never paid a lady for her services. Even at sixteen years old, and a pretty horny kid, I just never could do that. It had nothing to do with morals. It had to do with: That lady’s somebody’s daughter.

I’m about to tell you something I have never, ever told anybody: I never read anything that’s written about me. Ever.

Tom Shales in The Washington Post wrote about the telethon in 2003. He said, “The Jerry Lewis telethon is one of the greatest shows on earth, and one of America’s greatest showmen is the guy behind it.” I read that twice.

In 1954, a child diagnosed with muscular dystrophy was given a death sentence. He was gone in a year. A child today diagnosed with any of the neuromuscular diseases can go for twenty years. So you want to talk to me about using pity? I don’t care what I have to use. I used to say, If there’s a guy in a bar, and you tell me that if I become a transvestite I can get a hundred bucks out of him, I’ll dress up and get it if it’s for my kids.

You don’t have to be terribly funny to dress in drag. It’s no challenge.

That said, I’m ashamed to tell you that I turned down Some Like It Hot. See how smart I am? I felt I couldn’t bring anything funny to it. The outfit was funny. I don’t need to compete with the wardrobe. So whenever Billy Wilder saw me, he said, “Good afternoon, schmuck, how’s it going?” And, of course, Jack Lemmon sent me candy and roses every holiday, and the card always read: THANKS FOR BEING AN IDIOT.