THE OSCARS: LESS RECOGNIZABLE WITH CLOTHES
by Robin Abcarian, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
February 25, 2007 Sunday
Home Edition
Borat’s infamous wrestling partner is hot these days after the hit
film and a golden Globe speech.
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 industry people with whom he is taking meetings
o7even now f7don’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 o7your f7movies!" (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 L.A., graduated from Garfield High School, spent
most of his adulthood in Walnut, owns a sandwich joint called the Dip
in Sherman Oaks, and lives modestly with his family in Granada Hills.
It was like that at the "Borat" audition too, Davitian said. When his
now- 28-year-old son, Robert, a cinema major at Cal State 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 a darkened, empty nightclub in the
Hollywood & Highland complex, where the Oscar ceremony will be held
tonight. The club is next door to Davitian’s second location for the
Dip. "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, including
for the city of Malibu.
"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,
NAFTA arbitration, bankruptcy … and a move to the Valley.
"It was the worst experience of my life," said Davitian of his Mexican
misadventure. "I neglected my family, I neglected my rubbish business
here. I lost everything. I came home broke, broke, broke. My family
was mad. I worked as a car salesman, a telemarketer, a salesman for
another rubbish company. It was horrible."
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 first 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. "We all did our jobs,"
said Davitian, "and around this time, I started making headway in
the movie industry, getting bigger and better parts."
Like many swarthy actors with caterpillar eyebrows, Davitian has
been typecast. He’s had dozens of small roles in TV shows and a few
movies, often playing Armenian-surnamed characters — Sarcasian on
"The Closer," Hovanessian on "Six Feet Under," Papazian on "ER."
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 — ‘ "
After winning the role (for which there was no script but a detailed
outline), he was told not to expect much screen time. "So I thought,
‘OK, I will take this job, and if I am lucky and good, I’ll get
screen time.’ Larry and Sacha always said, ‘Be dressed, be ready,
be in the van, we’re leaving at 6. If we can use you, we will.’ "
About three weeks into the four-month shoot, a cross-country romp
in search of Borat’s love object, Pamela Anderson, during which the
faux-naif Borat elicits racist, sexist and anti-Semitic views from
unsuspecting Americans, Davitian was pretty sure of a couple of things:
He was in a good movie. And he’d be getting plenty of screen time.
"I don’t want to sound immodest, but I thought, ‘This is edgy, this
is different, this is new. And there is a chemistry between this tall,
skinny Cambridge-educated genius and the short, fat guy. It works!’ "
On screen, when they were supposed to be speaking Kazakh, Davitian
spoke Armenian; Baron Cohen spoke Hebrew. Davitian said he usually
had no idea what Baron Cohen was saying.
As Borat’s grim-faced straight man, he blow dries Borat’s hair
and other body parts, chastises Borat for running late, perches
expressionlessly in the front of the rickety ice cream truck they
use for their cross country travels. He is also licked in the ear by
a bear and turns up as Charlie Chaplin on Hollywood Boulevard after
the pair have a falling-out.
But the scene that will confer cinematic immortality is the horrifying
naked fight, which 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.
At 5-foot-5 and weighing over 300 pounds (and having just undergone
a hip replacement), one might assume Davitian would be reticent about
taking his clothes off. That’s true, he admitted. He tried to persuade
Charles and Baron Cohen to keep him in boxers, or at least briefs. "I
kept saying, ‘Fat, naked guy: not funny. That’s a Wes Craven movie. Fat
guy in boxers: hilarious."
And yet, when it came time to film the fight, he didn’t hesitate to
disrobe. "I will tell you why not," said Davitian. "Because you are
in a room with what you consider geniuses, and if the genius is gonna
get naked, I am following the genius."
It was this scene that Baron Cohen relived when he brought the house
down at last month’s Golden Globes, accepting for best actor in a
comedy or musical.
It was this scene that Baron Cohen relived when he brought the house
down at last month’s Golden Globes, accepting for best actor in a
comedy or musical. He recalled how "my 300-pound costar decided to
sit on my face and squeeze the oxygen from my lungs," and the awful,
"rancid" predicament he was then faced with.
Reaction shots of Davitian, who hadn’t been invited to the Globes but
was slipped tickets by a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.
at the last minute, showed him first shrugging and raising his wine
glass to Baron Cohen, then finally, as the actor lampooned him,
swigging from a wine bottle. "I was anticipating being on the list
of thank-yous," said Davitian. "But not that."
He recently treated himself to a new Cadillac and picked up some
fancy designer sunglasses at Golden Globes-related swag suites.
("There’s a lot of stuff you can’t use," he said. "A lot is girlie
stuff, and second of all, they don’t have anything that’s 3X.")
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 ‘E.R.’ next week. Special guest. First time for me —
no audition, no nothing, they called and said, ‘We want o7you.f7’
People are calling. This has the potential to change my life."
He is scheduled to appear on "Jimmy Kimmel Live," has been asked to
hand out water at the Los Angeles Marathon next Sunday, will appear
on "The View" and travel to London, all to help promote the March 6
release of the "Borat" DVD.
As of midweek, he had not been asked to the Oscars ("Borat" has been
nominated for adapted screenplay), but was hoping for a last-minute
invitation. When he heard that Baron Cohen turned down an offer to
be a presenter last week, he fell silent.
"Wow," he said after a pause. "Why would he do that? Well, call the
people who invited him and tell them I am available."