Sacha Baron Cohen spent part of Tuesday night’s Tonight Show hiding in plain sight.
Cohen was Fallon’s lead guest on the Oct. 20 show, there to promote his new movie, Ali G: Who Is I?, which hits theaters this weekend. But he turned up again at the end of the episode, joining Beck’s band on cello for a performance of “In the Night,” a song from Beck’s new album Ride Lonesome.
He was easy to miss among the eight-person string section. There was no mention of the appearance during Cohen’s interview with Fallon, no introduction when Beck took the stage, and not even a wink afterward.
It was an especially unlikely cameo for an Oscar-nominated actor best known for disappearing into characters like Ali G, Borat, and Brüno. But the cello predates all three by years.
Cohen learned the instrument as a child, and has said it was responsible for his first television appearance, on the British program Fanfare for Young Musicians.
He apparently kept at it, too. Cohen told Maureen Dowd in a 2020 New York Times interview that he still played cello and was planning to take lessons from master cellists.
Tuesday’s performance offered a rare public glimpse of that side of Cohen—although viewers who didn’t spot him in Beck’s string section could easily have watched the whole thing without realizing they were seeing him at all.
Watch Beck’s full Tonight Show performance of “In the Night”—with Cohen on cello—below:
