The funniest thing about Ali G: Who Iz I? may not be in the film at all. Joshua Loudermilk, 54, a North Carolina aspiring actor and recent Squire Dap in a dinner-theatre Camelot, says he recognized Sacha Baron Cohen within minutes of arriving on set — spotted the height, clocked the 'horrible plastic surgery,' and confirmed his suspicion the moment Cohen started calling the rubber-penis trigger a 'shmeckel.' Rather than break character, Loudermilk decided to go deeper: 'He's not going to punk me. I'm going to trick him.' Loudermilk found the gig on Craigslist in September 2025 — one of dozens of simultaneous posts from a body called the American Citizen Initiative, recruiting 'patriotic legal Americans' for a $300 border-awareness event. His motivations were purely mercenary: recently made redundant, broadly apolitical ('my mom's from Ireland'), and willing to perform any ideology for a paycheque. 'I want some George Soros money. I'll pretend to be whatever. Just let me feed my family.' He fabricated hard-right views on the application, named Borat correctly in the video interview, and got on a plane to Ontario, California, for $1,000 plus expenses, eventually clearing $1,700 total. What followed — the strap-on buttocks gun, the fake birth, the prosthetic baby covered in fake excrement, the drone flight to Mexico — Loudermilk played as straight comedy improv, deliberately escalating wherever Cohen pushed. When fellow recruit Michael Aboud, chair of the El Paso County Republican Party, dropped the prosthetic baby from the drone, Loudermilk had already handed Aboud the remote because he found it 'boring' and wanted to fire the butt-gun instead. He describes Aboud, who has since called Cohen 'a liar and a pervert' and plans to sue, with more sympathy than schadenfreude: 'He was scared to death, and obviously very uncomfortable, bless his heart.' The film states explicitly, repeatedly, that both men were 'not in on it.' Representatives for the production confirmed this again to the Guardian last week. Loudermilk's counter-evidence is banal and airtight: he posted three times on his public Facebook page and twice on Instagram immediately after the shoot, naming Cohen directly and expressing excitement about the project. The production never found the posts. 'The fact they missed that makes it even better to me. So I guess it's on them.' What this story actually reveals is a structural irony in the Cohen enterprise. The format depends on a bright line between mark and audience — the subject's humiliation is the joke, and the audience's knowledge is the power differential. Loudermilk collapsed that line from inside, performing hard-right credulity for a camera he knew was rolling, creating a layered fiction neither side fully controlled. Whether the film works as intended with this knowledge is a separate question. Whether Loudermilk is telling the truth is a third one — but his posted evidence predates the film's release by months, and his account is internally consistent in ways that invented alibis rarely are. There's also a minor ethical wrinkle Loudermilk acknowledges: he felt 'a little offended' watching Cohen target working-class Americans 'who aren't the brightest' for mockery they wouldn't understand. His response was to become their 'ally' while secretly defecting to the other team — which is either a generous read on his motivations or a neat post-hoc justification for what was primarily a well-paid acting gig. He's honest enough to give you both options. Loudermilk has not yet watched the film. He signed an NDA he was never given a copy of, considers it void now that he's named in the released movie, and is focused on the upside: 'I want to use this to my benefit.' He got eight hours of paid improv with Sacha Baron Cohen, a national press profile, and what sounds like a genuine answer to the question he went in to test — 'I was trying to see if I was any good at acting in comedy. And I realised: Oh, I think I'm good at this.' Hard to argue with the results.
