Featured Image Credit: 20th Century Fox
Topics: Borat, TV and Film
Jess Hardiman
You may know Borat as the mischievous, Kazakh journalist with a penchant for lime green mankinis, but it turns out the character has a back story even wilder than you could ever imagine – as his incredible Wikipedia entry shows.
First up, it turns out that he has a surname. Yep, while he styles himself in the manner of other mononymous celebs like Madonna and Adele, it transpires that Borat's surname is Sagdiyev.
Mind you, his middle name is arguably even more of a revelation, as it's... Margaret. Obviously.
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Borat, who is played by actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, was born and raised in the village of Kuzcek, Kazakh SSR, to Maryam Tulyakbay and Boltok the Rapist – his mother believed to have given birth to him when she was just nine years old.
“He has a (remarkably well-endowed) 13-year-old son named Hueylewis, 12-year-old twin boys named Bilak and Biram, as well as 17 grandchildren,” the Wikipedia page says.
“He has a sister, Natalya, whom at different times he has described as the ‘number four prostitute in all of Kazakhstan’. Another sister who appears to be a very young teenage girl is shown at the beginning of Borat's Guide to Britain.
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“It has been revealed in an interview with a general practitioner that he caught syphilis from one of his sisters during a Kazakh folk festival.”
Yikes.
It is unknown how many times Borat has been married, as Wikipedia explains, but he has had ‘at least five wives’, having previously admitted to being a bigamist with three additional lovers.
“One of his wives (Ludmilla) is said to have been shot by a hunter when he mistook her for a bear as she ploughed the fields,” the page says.
“His former wife, Oksana (who was also his half-sister as they had the same biological father), is reported in the Borat film to have been attacked, ‘violated’ and ‘broken’ by a bear while taking his brother Bilo for a walk in the forest. Borat is not saddened at all by the tragedy.”
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He later went on to marry Luenell, an African-American sex worker who he met while filming 2006 documentary Borat, although she is nowhere to be seen in the sequel.
Outside of his personal life, Borat is ‘nominally pagan’ in a ‘predominantly Muslim’ country, but has been said to ‘follow the hawk’.
He is a learned man, too, having attended Astana University to study English, journalism and plague research – the latter no doubt serving him well in recent years.
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“He created five new plagues which ‘killed over five million goats’ in Uzbekistan, the country that he has a strong hatred of,” Wikipedia states.
Before this plague research, he worked as an ice maker, ‘gypsy-catcher’ and ‘animal-puller’ (the one who ‘produces semen from animals’, that is), along with a computer maintenance engineer (specifically, ‘removing dead birds which had nested in the vest of computers’ casings’.)
And in an excerpt that sounds like it may well have been written by Borat himself, it says of his humour ‘arises from his espousal of outrageous sociocultural viewpoints, his violation of social taboos, and his use of vulgar language and behaviour in inappropriate settings’.
It adds: “Most often the comedy relies on Borat's obliviousness to First World natives not sharing his regressive worldview, but occasionally Borat's innocent and collegial demeanor will provoke his targets to reveal biases they would otherwise be reluctant to share publicly.”
We told you it was wild.