Next Up for Baron Cohen: Saddam Film

If you had any doubts about Sacha Baron Cohen's love of controversy, his next role should squash them: The Borat star will play a thinly veiled version of Saddam Hussein in a comedy called The Dictator. The film is loosely based on a book, Zabibah and The King, thought to have been written by Hussein, and the New York Observer notes that the book's king is basically a 12th-century stand-in for Hussein. The Huffington Post adds that the story, in which the king falls in love with a married girl whose husband rapes her, is an allegory: The king, while based on Saddam, represents Iraq and the rapist husband is the US. It will be released next May.
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