Sacha Baron Cohen Slips Into Beck’s String Section on ‘The Tonight Show’ to Play Cello

Sacha Baron Cohen was Jimmy Fallon’s lead guest on Tuesday night (Oct. 20). By the end of the episode, he was sitting in Beck’s string section, playing cello. He backed Beck on “In the Night,” a track from the new album Ride Lonesome, Billboard reports.

For once, Cohen wasn’t playing for laughs, or playing anyone at all. LateNighter notes there was no mention of it during Cohen’s interview, no introduction when Beck took the stage and not even a wink afterward, and that he was easy to miss among the eight-person string section. Watch the performance below.

The cello isn’t a gimmick for Cohen. LateNighter says he learned it as a child and has said it led to his first television appearance, on the British program Fanfare for Young Musicians. He told Maureen Dowd in a 2020 New York Times interview that he still played and planned to take lessons from master cellists, per LateNighter.

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“In the Night” sits on a record Billboard describes as sweeping and delicate, one that recalls the textures of Morning Phase and Sea Change. Ride Lonesome, which made our best new music of September list, came out Sept. 18 on Capitol Records and is Beck’s first collection of all-new material since 2019’s Hyperspace. Earlier in the show, he told Fallon what the music feels like:

It’s a moody kinda stuff. It’s the mood of like when you’re in your house, it’s almost dark but you haven’t turned the lights on. It’s kinda like blue hour.

Beck, to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, Billboard

Ride LonesomeBeckListen on Apple Music

Beck also told the Zoolander story. Luke Wilson’s Hansel character was (maybe) based on him, he said, and he was asked to be in the film but “stupidly said no,” so the producers got David Bowie instead, per Billboard. It has been a lively month for music on late-night TV: Rosalía sang “Reliquia” on pointe on SNL on Oct. 10.

Cohen’s own appearance was a promotional one. Ali G: Who Iz I?, his feature directorial debut, opens in U.S. cinemas for one week on Friday (Oct. 23) before streaming on Prime Video, per Billboard. Some activists have criticized the film, and Billboard says Cohen answered in a Time essay: “The fact that Ali G is outdated and problematic is the very reason I resurrected him.”