Sacha Baron Cohen gets lost in the disguise in first trailer for Netflix's The Spy
From Da Ali G Show to last year’s Who Is America?, Sacha Baron Cohen’s spent the bulk of his career in disguise, often to hilarious, uncomfortable effect. It’s both natural and, in a way, meta, then, that he’d saunter his way into more dramatic territory doing another kind of undercover work. In The Spy, a Netflix series based on true events, the shape-shifting performer plays Mossad agent Eli Cohen, who spent years living under an assumed identity while undercover in Syria. As the below trailer demonstrates, spending so much time in another’s shoes inevitably serves to blur one’s own sense of identity.
Noah Emmerich, who hunted spies on FX’s The Americans, co-stars as Eli’s Mossad handler, while Homeland’s Hadar Ratzon Rotem plays Eli’s wife, Nadia, who’s forced to raise a family on her own as her husband disappears for years on end. Israeli writer and director Gideon Raff helms the six-part series, which infiltrates Netflix on September 6.