‘High Value Target’ Star Waleed Zuaiter on Playing Saddam Hussein Ahead of the Finale

Playing a real person is already a challenge. Playing Saddam Hussein comes with an entirely different kind of weight, especially when the actor stepping into the role has his own history connected to the man he is portraying.

In TNT’s High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam, Waleed Zuaiter stars as Saddam Hussein opposite Joel Kinnaman’s John Nixon, the CIA analyst who interrogated the former Iraqi leader following his capture. As the limited series heads toward its finale, Zuaiter spoke with The TV Cave about the personal emotions the role brought back, finding humanity in Saddam without excusing his actions, and building the psychological battle at the center of those interrogation scenes.

For Zuaiter, taking on the role was personal from the beginning.

“I grew up in Kuwait, actually, and I was there when Iraq invaded,” Zuaiter told The TV Cave.

That experience meant approaching Saddam was about more than studying a historical figure. Zuaiter explained that working on the role brought up personal history connected to Saddam, including fear and trauma he did not realize he was still carrying.

Rather than beginning with the dictator the world remembers, Zuaiter looked further back. Saddam’s childhood became one of the entry points he used to understand the person behind the historical figure, allowing him to search for humanity without asking viewers to forgive or excuse the actions that followed.

That distinction is important because High Value Target spends so much time placing Nixon and Saddam across from one another in interrogation rooms. The series does not rely solely on the larger history surrounding Saddam’s capture. Much of its tension comes from watching two men study each other, searching for weaknesses and trying to maintain control of the conversation.

Zuaiter said there was another layer underneath that psychological battle as well. “There’s also a father-son theme,” he said while discussing the evolving dynamic between Saddam and Nixon. That element gives their relationship a different texture as the series moves forward. Nixon is technically the interrogator, but Saddam is constantly looking for ways to reclaim power inside a situation where nearly all of it has been taken away from him.

Some of that characterization came through surprisingly small details. Zuaiter pointed to Saddam’s behavior inside the interrogation space and the way he treated even that confined environment as something he could control. “It’s always his territory, his turf,” Zuaiter said.

Those touches become particularly effective because so many of the show’s strongest moments involve conversation rather than spectacle. A folded hood, a change in posture or the way Saddam positions himself inside the room can say almost as much as the dialogue, especially when both characters are trying to figure out exactly what the other knows.

Zuaiter and Kinnaman also had another advantage while shaping those scenes. Several of the interrogation sequences were revisited later in production, giving the actors an opportunity to return to material they had already performed and discover something different in it.

“We found other layers when we came in there,” Zuaiter said of revisiting the scenes.

That extra time appears to have helped deepen one of the most compelling relationships in the series. What begins as a straightforward interrogation gradually becomes something much more complicated, with Nixon attempting to understand a man he had spent years studying from afar while Saddam works just as hard to understand the person sitting across from him.

As High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam approaches its conclusion, Zuaiter’s comments add another layer to a performance built around contradictions. His task was never simply to imitate Saddam Hussein. It was to find enough humanity to make the character believable while never losing sight of the history attached to him.

That balance is part of what makes the interrogation scenes work, and it gives viewers plenty to think about as the series heads into its finale.

Check out our full interview below.