Megan Fox And John C. Reilly Added To Sacha Baron Cohen's 'The Dictator'

Megan Fox's name has come up this week through conversations that are a little bit unsavory (personally, I'm done with the backstage Transformers stuff, inasmuch as it was ever of interest beyond her role being recast) but here's a better piece of news for the actress.

She and John C. Reilly have both been added to the cast of The Dictator. That's the new film in which Sacha Baron Cohen and his Borat and Bruno director Larry Charles chronicle the not really true tale of a Middle Eastern despot who ends up in the US, and a goat herder who happens to be his exact double.

The film is a little bit Charlie Chaplin and a little bit Saddam Hussein, (it is based in part on the novel Zabibah and The King, which bears the despot's name, but was likely ghostwritten) but the more important thing seems to be that it could be a less improvised picture than either Borat or Bruno. The cast of the film is shaping up to be full of more 'real' actors than I would have expected. Previous reports suggested that there would still be a good level of improvised comedy, but with these actors it seems like the film will be more deliberately following a script (by Alec Berg, Jeff Schaffer and David Mandel) than we expect when seeing Sacha Baron Cohen's name with Larry Charles.

Here's the plot:

[Sacha] Baron Cohen plays a ruthless dictator who heads to the U.S. for a meeting at the United Nations and finds that his number two has replaced him with an unsuspecting sheepherder lookalike. As the dictator wanders the city, he meets the owner of an organic food store... She turns around his dictatorial thinking, and there's a little romance in it as well.

The new actors join Anna Faris (who plays the store owner), Ben Kingsley and Jason Mantzoukas in the cast, and their roles aren't known at this point. The Dictator will be released by Paramount on May 11, 2012. [THR]