Ken Davitian is enjoying, very much, his Hollywood high five

San Francisco Chronicle
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Page F-4

By Robin Abcarian, Los Angeles Times

Hollywood — When you think of Ken Davitian, you probably think of him
naked, obese and pendulous, nearly suffocating the tall but waifish
Sacha Baron Cohen in their famous naked hotel room fight in the hit
movie "Borat."

But there is so much more to Davitian, the 53-year-old actor who so
completely inhabited the part of Borat’s humorless Kazakh producer
Azamat Bagatov that in industry meetings, people even now don’t
realize he is a thoroughly local American actor.

"Last week, I met with executives at Disney," said Davitian, who
speaks slowly and deliberately. "They said, ‘We wanted to call you in
because we thought you’d already gone back to some foreign land. We
had no idea you were an American actor.’

"And I said, ‘But I was in ‘Holes’ — one of your movies!" (He played
the pig farmer Igor Barkov in the 2003 Disney adaptation of Louis
Sachar’s popular teen novel.)

As it happens, Davitian, who always yearned for the life of a
Hollywood actor, grew up in East Los Angeles and now owns a sandwich
joint called the Dip in the San Fernando Valley, where he lives
modestly with his family.

It was like that at the "Borat" audition too, Davitian said. When his
28-year-old son, Robert, a cinema major at California State University
Northridge, heard that "the great Larry Charles from ‘Seinfeld’ " was
directing a picture with the guy from "Da Ali G Show," he insisted his
dad read for the part of the "frumpy Eastern European."

"My perfect character!" said Davitian, sitting on a white pleather
banquette one recent morning in an empty nightclub in the Hollywood &
Highland complex, where the Oscar ceremony is being held Sunday night.
The club is next door to Davitian’s second Dip location. "All my
relatives are frumpy Eastern Europeans, Armenians with accents. This
is the character I have been doing since I was a child," he said,
lapsing into broken English to prove it.

Davitian, who has been riding high since "Borat" became a movie
phenomenon last fall, has arrived at his moment in the sun through a
rather circuitous route.

Though he studied theater arts in college and later had a small role
in an Albert Brooks movie (he ended up on the cutting-room floor),
Davitian went into his family’s waste-management business and for
years made a good living picking up other people’s trash.

"With the rubbish money that was coming in," he said, "we were doing
very well."

And then he made a disastrous business foray into Mexico, securing a
waste-management contract for a suburb of Mexico City. According to
legal documents, this would prove an enterprise for which his company
was ill prepared, and Davitian maintains he was victimized by a
corrupt system. The fiasco ended in multinational litigation, trade
arbitration and bankruptcy.

But he also had years of restaurant experience, so with help from his
father-in-law, he and his family opened a cafe in Burbank called
Gotham Grounds and later, the Dip.

His two sons and wife went to work, and he decided to put as much
energy as he could into getting his acting career off the ground. He
took acting classes and about seven years ago began getting cast more
often, mostly guest spots on TV shows.

At the "Borat" audition in front of Baron Cohen, director Charles and
writer Dan Mazer, Davitian showed up in character, wearing the
ill-fitting beige suit he later wore in most of the movie, his 8-by-10
head shot folded to fit in his pocket. "I did the audition in
character without giving them a resume or telling them I am an
American actor," Davitian said.

When it was over, in perfectly enunciated English, Davitian announced:
" ‘Thank you very much, gentlemen. If you liked the audition, please
call me, I had a great time.’ They stopped me, and said, ‘Wait a
minute …’ "

As they say, the rest is history, with one particular scene conferring
cinematic immortality: the horrifying naked fight. It begins in a
hotel room, spills into a hotel elevator and ends with his character
tumbling off a low stage in a hotel ballroom during a banquet for
mortgage brokers.

It was this scene that Baron Cohen relived at last month’s Golden
Globes, accepting for best actor in a comedy or musical. He recalled
how "my 300-pound co-star decided to sit on my face and squeeze the
oxygen from my lungs" and the awful, "rancid" predicament he was then
faced with.

Though he worked for close to scale on "Borat," which cost an
estimated $18 million and has grossed $247 million, Davitian has no
regrets.

"I am doing ‘ER’ next week. Special guest. First time for me — no
audition, no nothing. They called and said, ‘We want you.’ People are
calling. This has the potential to change my life."

i?f=/c/a/2007/02/24/DDGFJOA4KV1.DTL&type=movie s