Sacha Baron Cohen is currently shooting The Dictator, and while it’s not due out until May 2012, we’ve been given an early preview with the first official photo of Cohen dressed up as the title character. And we’re pretty sure that if you turned his head upside down, he’d look the same.
In the movie, Baron Cohen plays a ruthless dictator who heads to the US for a meeting at the United Nations and finds that his number two has replaced him with an unsuspecting sheepherder lookalike. As the dictator wanders the city, he meets the owner of an organic food store. She turns around his dictatorial thinking, and theres a little romance in it as well.
Bizarrely, it’s partly based on a book by Saddam Hussein (no, really, it is), called Zabibah And The King, with a little of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator thrown in. Jason Bateman, Anna Faris and Ben Kingsley co-star, with Larry Charles (Borat, Bruno) behind the camera.