Jon Stewart Hiatus From Show To Make Time For “Rosewater” Movie

Jon Stewart will go on hiatus from “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” beginning in June in order to direct his first feature film, entitled “Rosewater,” which will be produced by Stewart’s production company, Busboy Productions, along with Scott Rudin Productions and Odd Lot Entertainment. Longtime correspondent and writer John Oliver will host the Emmy® and Peabody® Award-winning series for the eight weeks of original episodes that are scheduled during Stewart’s hiatus.

John Oliver joined “The Daily Show” and The Best F#@king News Team Ever in 2006 and since arriving has done everything from interviewing UN Ambassadors to covering the World Cup in South Africa to breaking his nose fighting for the Confederate army. As a writer Oliver has been nominated for Emmy® and Writers Guild Awards and he won the Breakout Award at the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. He performs stand-up around the US and his one-hour special “Terrifying Times” debuted in April 2008. His stand-up series, “John Oliver’s New York Stand-Up Show” premiered on COMEDY CENTRAL in January 2010 and aired its third season last summer. Along with Andy Zaltzman, Oliver also writes and stars in a weekly podcast, “The Bugle: Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.”

“Rosewater,” a journalist’s story of his entry into the family business – government imprisonment and political incarceration in Iran – was written by Stewart and is based on the book, “Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival” by Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari. Bahari was falsely accused of being a spy and imprisoned by the Iranian government shortly after being interviewed by “Daily Show” correspondent Jason Jones in 2009 when he travelled to Iran to file a series of reports for the show (link to segment TK). Bahari later appeared as a guest on “The Daily Show” in June 2011.