Less recognizable with clothes

When you think of Ken Davitian, you probably think of him naked, obese and pendulous, nearly suffocating the tall but waifish Sacha Baron Cohen in their famous naked hotel room fight in the hit movie "Borat."

But there is so much more to Davitian, the 53-year-old actor who so completely inhabited the part of Borat's humorless Kazakh producer Azamat Bagatov that industry people with whom he is taking meetings even now don't realize he is a thoroughly local American actor.

"Last week, I met with executives at Disney," said Davitian, who speaks slowly and deliberately. "They said, 'We wanted to call you in because we thought you'd already gone back to some foreign land. We had no idea you were an American actor.'

"And I said, 'But I was in 'Holes' — one of your movies!" (He played the pig farmer Igor Barkov in the 2003 Disney adaptation of Louis Sachar's popular teen novel.)

As it happens, Davitian, who always yearned for the life of a Hollywood actor, grew up in East L.A., graduated from Garfield High School, spent most of his adulthood in Walnut, owns a sandwich joint called the Dip in Sherman Oaks, and lives modestly with his family in Granada Hills.

It was like that at the "Borat" audition too, Davitian said. When his now- 28-year-old son, Robert, a cinema major at Cal State Northridge, heard that "the great Larry Charles from 'Seinfeld' " was directing a picture with the guy from "Da Ali G Show," he insisted his dad read for the part of the "frumpy Eastern European."

"My perfect character!" said Davitian, sitting on a white pleather banquette one recent morning in a darkened, empty nightclub in the Hollywood & Highland complex, where the Oscar ceremony will be held tonight. The club is next door to Davitian's second location for the Dip. "All my relatives are frumpy Eastern Europeans, Armenians with accents. This is the character I have been doing since I was a child," he said, lapsing into broken English to prove it.

Davitian, who has been riding high since "Borat" became a movie phenomenon last fall, has arrived at his moment in the sun through a rather circuitous route.

Though he studied theater arts in college and later had a small role in an Albert Brooks movie (he ended up on the cutting-room floor), Davitian went into his family's waste management business and for years made a good living picking up other people's trash, including for the city of Malibu.

"With the rubbish money that was coming in," he said, "we were doing very well."

And then he made a disastrous business foray into Mexico, securing a waste management contract for a suburb of Mexico City. According to legal documents, this would prove an enterprise for which his company was ill prepared, and Davitian maintains he was victimized by a corrupt system. The fiasco ended in multinational litigation, NAFTA arbitration, bankruptcy … and a move to the Valley.

"It was the worst experience of my life," said Davitian of his Mexican misadventure. "I neglected my family, I neglected my rubbish business here. I lost everything. I came home broke, broke, broke. My family was mad. I worked as a car salesman, a telemarketer, a salesman for another rubbish company. It was horrible."

But he also had years of restaurant experience, so with help from his father-in-law, he and his family opened a cafe in Burbank called Gotham Grounds and later the first Dip.

His two sons and wife went to work, and he decided to put as much energy as he could into getting his acting career off the ground. He took acting classes and about seven years ago began getting cast more often, mostly guest spots on TV shows. "We all did our jobs," said Davitian, "and around this time, I started making headway in the movie industry, getting bigger and better parts."

Like many swarthy actors with caterpillar eyebrows, Davitian has been typecast. He's had dozens of small roles in TV shows and a few movies, often playing Armenian-surnamed characters — Sarcasian on "The Closer," Hovanessian on "Six Feet Under," Papazian on "ER."