Daily Show host Jon Stewart sparked headlines back in March when he announced he’d take a 12-week break this summer from the satirical news show to direct a film called Rosewater. Well, now we know who will be starring, because The Wrap reports that Gael Garcia Bernal has been cast in the lead.
Stewart adapted the script from BBC journalist Maziar Bahari’s book Then They Came For Me: A Family’s Story Of Love, Captivity And Survival. He picked up the rights a while ago, and has been hard at work at the keyboard in between hosting duties and his usual meetings with his staff to come up with ways to describe Dick Cheney’s heartless attitude towards the world.
The book, co-written with Aimee Molloy, is the harrowing story of Bahari’s assignment to cover the Iranian presidential elections in 2009. The plan was that he'd only be away from his pregnant fiancée for a week, but he was accused of spying (ironically, an appearance on The Daily Show was held up as evidence), imprisoned and interrogated for 118 days by a man he knew only by one thing: that he smelled of rosewater.
Bernal most recently cropped up in Pablo Larrain’s No, and is working on Roberto Sneider’s Deserted Cities. He’ll also crop up in The Ardor and just yesterday was signed up for Pablo Aguero's Evita project.