ACG: One thing the miniseries clearly does is to provide insight into the women in Saddam’s family. I’m particularly thinking of a couple of scenes involving his first wife Sajida Khairallah Tufah (portrayed by Shohreh Aghdashloo). In one, she tells him he has killed all his true friends, and all he has left are weak men who fear to tell him the truth. In another, she is horror-stricken that the bodies of her murderous sons Uday and Qusay were displayed on international television. Do you think viewers will be able to identify with the women depicted?

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AH: I hope so. One thing important thing to do is to make people understand that characters, whatever their historical role, had reasons for what they did and what they feel. Any mother would be appalled at seeing her son’s bodies displayed on television.

In a way, Sajida was the one person who could tell Saddam the truth. Several people I talked with told me she was one of the few people who could be honest with him. They had a very complex relationship.

ACG: Then there’s Saddam’s mother, a paranoid hag who almost makes Tony Soprano’s manipulative mom look sweet. How much influence do you think she had on Saddam’s life?

AH: If you look at her circumstances, the way we told the story, she had to represent an awful lot of history—all of Saddam’s upbringing. She represented the hard way of life when you live in poverty in Iraq. To grow up in Iraqi society without a father, as Saddam did, is exceedingly difficult.

Her character was based on what people who knew her told me about her relationship with Saddam. To survive and raise a son in the circumstances she did she had to be a formidable person, but she had antiquated views of power and loyalty that Saddam was both attracted to and repelled by.

ACG: In an early scene, Iraq’s president Ahmed Hassan Bakr praises his minister Saddam for all Saddam has done for the Iraqi people—building schools, hospitals and the like. Were Saddam’s actions indeed beneficial for his people before he gained complete power?

AH: I think that during the 1970s there’s no doubt Saddam did a great deal to improve the lot of the average Iraqi, such as nationalizing the oil industry, establishing a level of women’s emancipation beyond anything else found in the Islamic world, and so on. He was a social reformer but politically repressive. Ultimately, the political repressive side took over. That is when the true tragedy of Saddam for Iraq became clear.

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