Sacha Baron Cohen had no qualms about playing the very devilish Mephisto in Ironheart, and potentially the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe as well. It turns out the showrunners had some qualms about his catsing, though, until he reassured them. They probably needn’t have worried at all, as Baron Cohen has played all manner of unpleasant characters, from the culturally appropriating Ali G to the bigoted Borat. While one could make a case that those characters are simply misguided, the actor has taken some criticism for their bad behavior, even when said behavior is supposed to call attention to its own deliberate awfulness, as a parody of same.
Mephisto, however, is basically Satan in the Marvel universe. Not literally so, as Marvel doesn’t need that headache from religious protesters, but effectively — he’s often shown in the comics as a red, horned devil who bargains for people’s souls. The worry, as Sacha Baron Cohen revealed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Variety) was that as a Jewish man, he might feel he was being cast based on anti-Semitic stereotypes.
Sacha Baron Cohen Was Fine Playing a Devil, But Appreciated the Sensitivity
As Borat, Baron Cohen has often used the anti-Semitic trope of Jews having horns. There’s a scene in the first movie where residents of his village in Kazakhstan wear giant devil puppet heads to represent Jews, and on his old Ali G TV show, Borat goaded a bar audience into singing an anti-Jewish song with the lyric, “You must grab him by his horns.” Given some of the historic tensions between the Jewish and Black communities, the producers were sensitive to the optics of it all. “It was primarily, I think, an almost entirely Black producing and directing team,” he said. “And they said, ‘We want to offer you Mephisto, but we are aware of the negative association of Jews historically with the devil, and we want to make sure that you’re not insulted by us offering this.’ It was such an amazingly considerate, empathetic thing to say. And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m good.’”
The actor referred to it as a moment of being seen, which he appreciated — though he has a plenty thick skin to do the kind of prank character-based comedy that he favors. Sacha Baron Cohen is, after all, a man who tried to coax a murder confession out of OJ Simpson using CIA techniques. Still, there’s a danger in playing bigots for laughs, that some fans and coworkers may misunderstand, and real bigots may laugh with him. “I think for the Jews out there, sometimes we don’t feel seen,” he said. “We don’t feel like people can empathize with us, that we are suffering too.”
At least nobody is likely to confuse him for an actual Satan and try to sell their soul to him — Mephisto is a rare example of Baron Cohen simply acting, and leaving the role on set when he leaves. His arrival was long-awaited, too. Mephisto was rumored to join the MCU as early as WandaVision, and Baron Cohen’s name was attached in rumors long before it was official. His appearance in Ironheart may not have been as surprising, given all that, but the ending of the show, which involved him, was: it saw heroine Riri Williams effectively sell her soul to him in exchange for her best friend’s life. It was one hell of a cliffhanger that Marvel needs to revisit — a girl genius in an Iron Man suit isn’t just going to move quietly through the timeline. With Baron Cohen clearly happy to play the character, here’s hoping we get more.
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