British actor Sacha Baron Cohen has publicly apologized to the people of Kazakhstan for his portrayal of Borat in the 2006 film of the same name. “Borat” follows Borat Sagdiyev, a fictional journalist from Kazakhstan who travels to the United States to make a documentary, encounters American culture, and finds himself in all sorts of comical 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 on the podcast “Happy Sad Confused.”

Baron Cohen said he had developed an earlier version of the character for the BBC, with a different name and Albanian nationality. His name and nationality later changed depending on which television channel was paying for the show. “I would just say, ‘Oh, that character already belongs to the BBC. I’ve got a completely new character, this guy’s called Alexi Krickler, he’s from Moldova,’” Baron Cohen said.

The actor reiterated that at some point he had chosen Kazakhstan as a place “that no-one knows anything about.” He emphasized that he doesn’t even know what a Kazakh accent sounds like. Before recounting a complaint from the Kazakh Embassy, he apologized for being unable to imitate a Kazakh accent and said he would use Borat’s accent for the anecdote because his knowledge of Central Asian accents was limited.

Baron Cohen described the apology as his first for the character he created, though he has had to defend Borat ever since the film came out. “The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist,” the actor said in a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone.

Over the years, Kazakhstan’s authorities have shifted from hostility toward “Borat” to acceptance. In 2005, the country’s Foreign Ministry threatened to sue Baron Cohen and claimed his show had been commissioned for political ends to tarnish the international reputation of Kazakhstan and its people.

In 2006, shortly before the film’s release, the country’s authorities paid for a four-page advertising supplement in The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune touting Kazakhstan’s achievements in the 21st century.

Although “Borat” was not officially banned in Kazakhstan, it never screened in the country’s movie theaters after its world premiere. The film also did not receive a theatrical distribution license in Russia.

Over time, attitudes toward Borat in Kazakhstan softened. In 2017, Czech tourists in Astana got off with a small fine for walking around dressed as Borat (Baron Cohen himself offered to pay it). In 2020, Kazakh Tourism, the company responsible for promoting tourism within Kazakhstan, adopted his catchphrase “Very nice!” as the country’s official tourism slogan.

By then, a sequel to “Borat” had been released worldwide, and the Kazakh diaspora in the United States continued to oppose it. In November 2020, the Kazakh American Association called for “Borat 2” to be excluded from consideration for Oscar, Golden Globe, and other award nominations.