Jon Stewart will be taking a 12-week hiatus from The Daily Show this summer to direct Rosewater, a feature film he adapted from the book Then They Came For Me: A Family’s Story Of Love, Captivity And Survival. Deadline has the details:
Published in 2011 by Random House, the book is Maziar Bahari’s harrowing ordeal of leaving London in June 2009 to cover Iran’s presidential elections. With a pregnant fiancee left behind, the BBC journalist expected to be away for a week. Instead, he spent the next 118 days in Iran’s most notorious prison being brutally interrogated by a man he knew only by one thing: he smelled of Rosewater. […]
[Stewart] quietly optioned the book through his Busboy Productions banner, and had a personal stake in the story: After Bahari was accused of spying, one of the items used against him was an appearance he made on The Daily Show. [Deadline]
Stewart likes to make jokes at his own expense about his pre-Daily Show film career (Death to Smoochy, Big Daddy, Half Baked, etc.), so I imagine he’ll have a little fun with the concept of a guy with that résumé trying to tackle a movie about torture and tense Middle Eastern issues. On The Daily Show, I mean. I doubt he’ll pop into frame to do a little soft-shoe and recite his IMDB page during Rosewater. But, hey, what do I know? He’s the director.
While Stewart is out, longtime Daily Show correspondent John Oliver will fill in as host for eight weeks of new shows. This looks like good news on paper, but I swear, if he turns the show into pro-British propaganda and it convinces everyone in America that the Revolutionary War was a mistake and maybe being colonies wasn’t all that bad and we end up back under British rule, I’m gonna be so pissed.
