The sixth season of Fox's hit series 24, on which Alexander Siddig (Bashir) will play series regular Hamri Al-Assad, returns this weekend with a two-night, four-hour premiere that also introduces James Cromwell (Zephram Cochrane) as main character Jack Bauer's estranged father.

The Signal reported that this year's 24-hour day for the series starts and ends at 6 a.m. and is set 20 months after the fifth season, or Day 5. Each hour-long television episode represents an hour of real time for Day 6 in the life of Jack Bauer, played by Emmy winner Kiefer Sutherland.

Sid City has scans from Entertainment Weekly's pull-out guide to 24, which includes a full page on Siddig's character. "Al-Assad is the season's primary villain. Or maybe he's not. Hell, even the Sudanese-born Siddig (Kingdom of Heaven) doesn't know," notes the article, which quotes series producers as saying that Al-Assad is a charismatic and intellectual terrorist leader.

"As soon as he puts one coat on, he seems to be something else," said Siddig, who called Jack Bauer's latest adversary "one of the most ambiguous characters to hit the show in a very long time", not at all a stereotypical Muslim terrorist. However, Siddig mentioned that characters he play have a tendency to die, joking, "If I were to pick up a flowerpot and explode one day on 24, it wouldn't surprise me."

Siddig has also recently signed to star in a French film, Un Homme Perdu, in which he will play Fouad Saleh, an amnesiac who disappeared from Beirut 17 years before the start of the film. He encounters French photographer Thomas Koré (Melvil Poupaud), who tries to discover his origins. According to a press release at Sid City, the movie will film in Beirut, Jordan and Paris for a planned November 2007 release. Beirut-born Danielle Arbid wrote the screenplay and will direct.

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