BACK IN THE BIZ By J. KELLY NESTRUCK Canadian National Post January 7, 2004 Less than a year after announcing his retirement, the world's most famous Saddam Hussein impersonator has decided he is ready to return to show business. Now that the real Saddam has been captured and the euphoria has died down, Jerry Haleva, who has satirized the former Iraqi ruler in such movies as Hot Shots!, The Big Lebowski and Mafia!, is prepared to once again take up the mantle of the deposed dictator on the silver screen. In March of last year, when the United States and its allies invaded Iraq, Haleva, a California-based lobbyist and Republican, felt it was no longer prudent or funny to continue moonlighting as a Saddam look-alike in Hollywood. He told the Los Angeles Times he was hanging up his beret, and he stopped talking to the media about his movie career.

"When the war broke out, I actually did turn down about 50 interview requests, including BBC London, because I didn't think it was appropriate given the active stage of combat and the fact that we had so many young men in Saddam's target;' Haleva said over the phone from his Sacramento office this week.

But now that Saddam is no longer at large, Haleva believes it's possible to laugh at the mustachioed dictator once again. "The fact that I'm doing this interview probably indicates that I think it's more light-hearted again," Haleva said. "Clearly, there's still a tragic situation going on with insurgents in Iraq that gives me pause, but the actual Saddam representation takes on a little bit more humor again."

Haleva, a dark-haired Sephardic Jew who is on the executive committee of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, first realized he was Saddam's doppelganger -and ideological opposite- in 1989 when the Los Angeles Times ran a picture of the then obscure Iraqi dictator waving to his troops. As a joke, the sergeant-at-arms at the California Senate, where Haleva worked, had made copies of the photo and distributed it on the floor with the caption: "Now we know what Haleva does on his weekends.”

Two years later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, Haleva was contacted by an L.A. based look-alike agency, which had heard about his resemblance to Saddam. Soon after, he was cast in his first movie, Hot Shots! , a 1991 spoof of Top Gun by Jim Abrahams, which appeared in theatres just months after the Gulf War ended. Haleva only appeared as Saddam in the movie briefly -a bomb drops in his lap while he relaxes on a chaise lounge -but the scene was popular enough that Saddam's role was expanded for the 1993 sequel, HotShots! Part Deux.

For Part Deux, because Saddam had to speak and act, Haleva had to audition for the role. Despite a lack of acting experience, he got the part. And once the writers saw how funny he was, they expanded his part, adding in lines like, "Now I will kill you until you die from it!"

"It's not only my favorite, but my largest role, too," Haleva said. “It portrayed Saddam in such a disparaging and unflattering way. I was particularly fond of [that].”

Since the Hot Shots! movies, Haleva has appeared in three other comedies: the Coen brothers' cult hit The Big Lebowski(1998), in which Saddam hands out bowling shoes in a dream sequence; Jane Austen's Mafia! (1998), another Abrahams spoof; and the First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (2002), in which he played Hologram Saddam. Though he prefers playing funny Saddams, Haleva agreed to played a dramatic Saddam once, in the 2002 HBO docudrama Live from Baghdad starring Michael Keaton. "It was...so well done, which is why I agreed to portray him in a serious way," he said.

While Haleva has always enjoyed his sideline as a Saddam impersonator, his primary career remains at Sergeant Major Associates, where he lobbies for such companies as BMW Motorcycles, Point Blank Body Armor and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. "I'd like to think I'm a fairly effective advocate at getting problems solved in the governmental arena," he said. His clients, he says, have always been aware of his unorthodox hobby and have never been offended.

It was only when the second Gulf War broke out that Haleva began to be more shy about his hobby. He began to downplay his Saddam work in his marketing literature. Then, in March of 2003, he told the Los Angeles Times that "What I do has always been in good fun, but some things are no longer funny. My physical resemblance to Saddam may well be one of them." Then, he stopped doing interviews on the subject.

But now that Saddam is in the custody of the United States Army and is awaiting trial for war crimes, Haleva feels ready to resume making fun of the Iraqi dictator. "I have to be fairly selective on what I can do, because of my real job,” he said. "But if the right opportunity comes along and I have time for it, I'm always interested.” The only thing that may stand in his way is Saddam's scraggly new beard. "Clearly, we have different grooming habits now,” Haleva remarked.

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