Well, we'll give this to Sacha Baron Cohen: he couldn't have picked a nicer guy to ash.
But he almost picked a different superstar to infamously dump fake remains over when he walked the red carpet at the Oscars this year.
Who, you ask? Good sport extraordinaire Ryan Seacrest revealed just which Oscar-winning movie star was the original intended target of the Dictator star's prank on his radio show this morning, while also relaying some even more surprising news: Cohen actually apologized!
Here's how it went down…
Proving his ubiquity, Seacrest casually mentioned how, over the weekend, he was hanging backstage at Saturday Night Live when he ran into an unexpected face…which led to an even more unexpected meeting.
"I saw Isla Fisher and I said hi, and she said these words, and then it dawned on me. She said, 'I apologize for my husband.' And I said, 'Oh, yes, yes, gotcha, thank you, thank you very much for saying that'…I didn't realize her husband, The Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen, was doing a walk-on cameo."
Seacrest said the comedian then walked right by him and out on stage to perform his bit on "Weekend Update." When it was done, he made a beeline straight for the E! News man.
"He comes off stage, comes over to me, breaks character and says sorry about the Oscars, it wasn't personal," Seacrest relayed, adding that Cohen was "very very apologetic and genuine and kind and sweet."
"Then he started telling me how it went down…Originally he said that they were going to spill whatever it was in that urn on George Clooney. Someone decided that wasn't a great idea because he was up for a lot of nominations, it was a big night that night. Then they somehow spun the wheel of tragedy and landed on my name."
Seacrest confirmed to his KIIS-FM cohort that this was the first he'd directly heard from the despot-channeling actor since the incident, though noted that, "He apparently sent me a jacket that I think we donated to charity."
As for Cohen, he's been making the rounds recently in support of his film, this morning turning up on the Today show and wreaking all kinds of havoc on Matt Lauer, appearing in character as Admiral General Shabazz Aladeen and alluding to an imagined affair between the anchor and Ann Curry, pulling out a chunk of hair that ostensibly belonged to Matt's wife Annette and then admitting to "sex activity" between himself and Megan Fox, Katy Perry and Oprah Winfrey.
During a press conference earlier today (held, as always, in character), the dictator also revealed another imagined celebrity conquest, Kim Kardashian, before telling E! News he vowed to get all three of the Kardashian sisters deported "to the Middle East."
Though apparently even dictators know the bounds of their power, because immediately after the disclosure, he backtracked a bit, jokingly adding that the sisters very well might beat him up for that remark. We know who our money'd be on in that fight.