The actor Sacha Baron Cohen apologized to the Kazakhs for the character Borat.
"I want to apologize for the first time to the people of Kazakhstan, because Borat has nothing to do with Kazakhstan. […] I respect your people, your culture. Please don't take it personally. When I started working on the character of Borat, the Kazakh embassy filed a perfectly fair complaint. [...] I apologize."
On the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Cohen said he originally developed the Borat character for a BBC show, but at the time the character had a different name and was Albanian.
The character's country of origin then changed depending on which TV channel financed the project.
According to the actor, at some point the rights were transferred to HBO and Cohen chose Kazakhstan for his character, deciding that it was "a place nobody knows anything about."
The movie "Borat" was released in 2006. In 2020, Cohen returned to the role in the sequel.