Barry Keoghan to star in Saddam Hussein movie, but he’s not playing Saddam Hussein

Barry Keoghan has built a nice career playing the occasional naughty little freak, most explicitly in The Batman where he played a Joker who was so twisted that he only appeared in a deleted scene, but he also recently played the naughty little freak character in Saltburn. According to The Hollywood Reporter, he’ll now be starring in an adaptation of Will Bardenwerper’s book The Prisoner In His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, And What History Leaves Unsaid, but he will unfortunately not be playing Saddam Hussein himself.

The book is about the six months leading up to Hussein’s execution, and Keoghan will play one of the American soldiers tasked with guarding him. According to the film’s official synopsis, he “grows close to Saddam, sharing the stale air of a bombed-out palace turned into a high-security prison whilst navigating the fine line separating fact and fiction.” So maybe he will be a bit naughty in this one? It’s hard to say.

The movie version will be called Amo Saddam—“Uncle Saddam,” a nickname given to the dictator—and will be directed by Chernobyl’s Johan Renck. This will be a reunion, then, for him and Keoghan, after the Irish actor appeared in a couple of episodes of the HBO miniseries. He played Pavel, a young man drafted into the grim task of cleaning up the area around the nuclear plant, which involved… shooting stray dogs. (The storyline was a bummer, but name one storyline from Chernobyl that wasn’t.)

As for casting Saddam Hussein, Renck told The Hollywood Reporter that he wants a “really good actor from the region, who speaks Arabic and can authentically embody the role.” He also said that it’s less of a typical war movie and more of a “prison movie” or even “kind of a horror movie almost.”