Ken Davitian, who played Azamat Bagatov in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is back in theaters today with the opening of Get Smart. Freelance writer Craig Stephens got to know him a little better:
Comedic actor Ken Davitian is probably better known for his role as Borat’s sidekick and nude wrestling skills than anything else, but with his turn as Xerxes in Meet the Spartans and now KAOS agent Shtarker in Get Smart, he’s becoming one of Hollywood’s more popular character actors. Without much prodding, Davitian offers the basics of the storyline. “CONTROL has been rendered a second-class agency due to the proliferation of the CIA and the FBI,” he reveals. “KAOS manages to wipe out most of CONTROL, so the Chief is forced to promote Maxwell Smart to agent, where he is teamed up with the experienced Agent 99. KAOS is smuggling nuclear weapons into the U.S. and Max and 99 must prevent KAOS’s Siegfried and Shtarker from using them.”
Davitian’s own story is about as Hollywood as it is cloak-and-dagger—which is to say, neither. He’s married, 55 years old, and of Armenian descent. (In Borat, the language in which Azamat harangued Sacha Baron Cohen’s main character was actually Armenian, not Kazakh—but you knew that.) He has two adult sons and owns and manages runs two French dip sandwich stores (called “The Dip”) in L.A. Prior to his adventures in sandwiching, Ken ran his family waste disposal company, making a healthy wage and seeing his fleet of garbage trucks grow from two to ten. But after investing heavily in a Mexico City contract, he says, he lost millions when a competitor with government connections ran him out of town—at one point, threatening to plant cocaine on him and have him busted.
Broke and with a young family to support, he returned to L.A. and resumed his acting career.For a while he juggled various survival jobs, including telemarketing and selling contracts for a pal’s waste disposal business, until his Hollywood happy ending arrived in the form of his Borat role.
“The Borat film really blew the doors off my career. I was initially told I would only have half my face shown while driving the ice cream truck, but I ended up appearing throughout the film.” In the two years since Borat, Davitian has appeared in a half-dozen films, and has guest-starred on E.R. and The Ghost Whisperer. He has another half-dozen movies in the works, and has been approached for two proposed Get Smart follow-ups.
It’s amazing the success that can follow from dangling your scrotum in Sacha Baron Cohen’s face. “The nude scene wrestling Sacha was totally unscripted,” he recalls. “We just acted on his verbal direction. We rehearsed it three times, with showers in between takes. Initially I tried to talk him out of it, but Sacha clinched the deal when he told me: If you do this scene, I can practically guarantee you an invitation to the Playboy mansion.”
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