Barry Keoghan is set to star in Amo Saddam, an upcoming drama film from Chernobyl director Johan Renck, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The film will focus on the final days of former Iraqi president Hussein, with Keoghan set to play an American soldier tasked with guarding the dictator in the months leading up to his trial and subsequent execution.
The film’s script will be based on the bestselling book The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid by Will Bardenwerper. The book itself is an account of the dozen U.S. soldiers who guarded Hussein.
No other casting decisions have been made as of yet
As of now, no one has been cast to star in the film as Hussein, although Renck did tell THR that he was looking for a “really good actor from the region, who speaks Arabic and can authentically embody the role.”
Renck also briefly spoke about the movie, saying that he hopes to make it in a “really immersive, authentic way,” and hopes to avoid the “typical tropes of a war movie” in the process. The film will mostly take place in Camp Victory, a compound that served as a base for forces in Iraq.
“So you have this American enclave with walls around it while right outside is Baghdad, this goya-esque painting of sectarian violence where all the chaos unleashed by these actions of the Western world are taking place. That contrast is something we tap into in the script”, Renck said. “In a weird way, it’s a prison movie, it’s a war movie and it’s kind of a horror movie almost. There’s a little bit of genre-bending going on.”
“In the six months preceding Saddam’s execution, our soldier 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,” reads the film’s logline. “Amo Saddam attempts to reckon with the American imperial machine that has come to define the 21st century.”
