It has been announced that Jon Stewart is going to take a break from hosting The Daily Show this summer for 12 weeks. He will be replaced by John Oliver, according to Deadline New York. Stewart is taking a break from the show so he can make his movie directing debut.
Stewart wrote the script for and is going to direct Rosewater, which is the adaptation of the book Then They Came For Me: A Family’s Story Of Love, Captivity And Survival. The book was written by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Malloy. It tells the harrowing story of how Bahari went to Iran in 2009 to cover the presidential election, but wound up spending four months in prison in Tehran. The government believed he was plotting a revolution when he was in the country.
“I am a television person who is accustomed to having a thought at 10 AM and having it out there at 6:30 PM and moving on, so this is a little scary, yes. One of the reasons we are in this business is to challenge ourselves.”
“I really connected to Maziar’s story,” Stewart told the New York Times. “It’s a personal story but one with universal appeal about what it means to be free.”