Actress and comedian Rebel Wilson has a new memoir coming out titled Rebel Rising. In it, she apparently spends a chapter detailing her work with, as she refers to him, an “a—hole” that she worked with during her career.
In a series of Instagram posts over the weekend (via Us Weekly), Wilson revealed that said “a—hole” was “trying to threaten me” and had “hired a crisis PR manager and lawyers” to deal with Wilson’s book and the negative publicity it could potentially generate.
In another post, she then identified the a—hole as Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen.
Wilson and Cohen co-starred in the 2016 action comedy The Brothers Grimsby. A spoof of Bond movies, it stars Mark Strong as the world’s greatest secret agent, and Cohen as his dopey, obnoxious brother. The pair must work together to stop an evil plot. Wilson played Cohen’s girlfriend in the film.
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As news of Wilson’s claims broke online, an old interview she gave where she talked about working with Cohen resurfaced online. On Australian radio’s Kyle and Jackie O Show in 2014, Wilson called Cohen “so outrageous” and said “every day he’s like, ‘Just go naked, it will be funny.’ And I’m, like, ‘No!’ “Sacha and I have the same agent in America and I’m like, ‘Sacha, I’m going to call our agent Sharon and tell her how much you are harassing me.’”
After Wilson went public with her a—hole accusations, Cohen released a statement that read, “While we appreciate the importance of speaking out, these demonstrably false claims are directly contradicted by extensive detailed evidence, including contemporaneous documents, film footage, and eyewitness accounts from those present before, during and after the production of The Brothers Grimsby.”
Regardless of what is alleged, that style of explicit sexual humor is certainly at the heart of The Brothers Grimsby, which Cohen co-wrote. In my review of the movie back in 2016, I wrote:
At heart, Sacha Baron Cohen is as much provocateur as comedian, and he might love a good shock even more than he loves a good laugh. Since success stripped him of his ability to move anonymously among the population, he’s had to find more conventional ways to satisfy his urge to mess with people. In The Brothers Grimsby, that mostly means sex jokes that are way more graphic than in a typical mainstream comedy; expect to hear gasps of dismay at some of the lewder content. (Three words: Animal full frontal.) Some of this stuff is in such obviously poor taste that one wonders if the subjects of Baron Cohen’s latest hidden camera experiment are The Brothers Grimsby’s paying customers.
Wilson’s memoir is scheduled for publication on April 2.
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