ARTS AND CULTURE

Sacha Baron Cohen

Actor

British comedian and actor Sasha Baron Cohen recently said that he used to pass up offers that he feared would “typecast” him as a Jewish actor. Yet he currently stars as Mossad agent Eli Cohen in the Netflix miniseries The Spy, after he couldn’t put down Israeli director Gideon Raff’s script. “So I gave up this position of avoiding Jewish or Israeli roles,” he said. The Netflix show is based on the true story of Eli Cohen, chosen by the Mossad to infiltrate the Syrian government in the 1960s. He was given a fake identity as a wealthy Syrian businessman, but was discovered by the Syrian government and publicly hanged in 1965 in Damascus. (Photo: Joella Marano / CC BY-SA 2.0)