Raph_PH · CC BY 2.0

Sacha Baron Cohen built his career on characters designed to get real people to reveal themselves — Ali G's fake-naive interviews, and Borat, whose 2006 mockumentary got unsuspecting Americans on camera saying things a scripted satire never could. A Cambridge graduate trained in French clown technique at École Philippe Gaulier, he later played Israeli spy Eli Cohen in Netflix's The Spy and interviewed real political and media figures again in Who Is America?, keeping the format he started with two decades earlier.