Rebel Wilson
Memories of Sasha Baron Cohen redacted in England
Are not green: Rebel Wilson and Sasha Baron Cohen.
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The British edition of Rebel Wilson’s memoirs appears partially redacted. The text passages about Sasha Baron Cohen were censored.
In her memoir “Rebel Rising,” published in April, Australian actress Rebel Wilson (44) planted a lot of explosives. She recently accused a British royal of trying to seduce her into a drug orgy. Now it is announced that the British edition of her memoirs, with some passages redacted, will be available in bookstores across the Kingdom, as the Guardian reports. In it, Wilson reports on her experiences with her British colleague Sasha Baron Cohen (52), also known as “Borat”. On the set of the crime comedy “Grimsby”, released in Germany in 2016 under the title “The Spy and His Brother”, she felt “harassed, humiliated and compromised” by Cohen, said Wilson. Despite the redactions, some details have now come to light.
“Worst experience of my professional life”
“Grimsby” tells the bizarre story of two dissimilar brothers who were separated by adoption and meet again 28 years later: one is now an MI6 agent, his flashy brother, played by Cohen, has eleven children and a wife, played by Rebel Wilson . In a chapter of her memoir titled “Sacha Baron Cohen and Other Assholes,” Wilson recounts the “Grimsby” shoot and Cohen: “SBC called me through a production assistant and told me they needed me to shoot an additional scene “What followed was the worst experience of my professional life. An incident that left me feeling harassed, humiliated and compromised. Due to the specific nature of the law in England and Wales, it cannot be reproduced here.” The rest of the page and other lines on the following page are blacked out.
Request for “re-shooting” and “graphic sex scene”
Elsewhere in her memoir, Wilson writes that Cohen repeatedly demanded that she “be naked in a future scene.” She told him she wouldn’t do nude scenes: “I kept saying ‘no’ to him and he didn’t like that.” Another passage refers to an email to Wilson in which she summoned Cohen to London for a “reshoot” of a “graphic sex scene.” She writes that she called a meeting with him, the screenwriters and the director Louis Leterrier (50) to explain what she would “like to do and what not” in the scene. In the book, she writes, “The attitude I sensed from them was: Rebel Wilson is causing a problem. I’m the problem. Why don’t I just film the graphic sex scene as it was written, in which the bed falls through the floor falls because I’m so overweight?” Eventually she agreed to “shoot something so I could get out of this embarrassing room.”
“Sensible, very late step”
Cohen’s management commented on the deletion of the passages in the UK edition, saying: “The publisher did not review this chapter of the book before publication and took the sensible but very belated step of deleting Rebel Wilson’s defamatory claims after the evidence was provided that they were wrong.” Printing falsehoods is against the law in the United Kingdom and Australia. This is not a “special feature”, as Ms Wilson claims, but a legal principle that has applied for many hundreds of years. Cohen’s representatives see the redactions as a “clear victory for Sacha Baron Cohen” that “confirms what we have said from the beginning – that this is demonstrably false in a shameful and failed attempt to sell books.” The final chapter in this dispute does not seem to have been written.