Forest Whitaker is not so big. Maybe 6-foot-1, 6-foot-2. His hunched shoulders and unself-conscious and (let's face it) slightly goofy smile diminish his size, if not his reputation.
Still, you wonder. As the brutally short interview begins, forced by a plane he has to catch to only a few minutes, Whitaker shifts in his seat, preparing for a high-energy exchange. One of Hollywood's most fascinating actors, with a reputation for allowing himself to become consumed by his roles, he could easily lord it over the interview. But instead he immediately seems to treat it as a learning opportunity and offers up a stream of ideas about some of the most involving roles he has played -- two in particular.
Charlie Parker, whom he depicted in the 1988 breakthrough film Bird, lived on the edge between soaring bebop freedom and dark drug dependency. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, whom Whitaker brings to the screen in The Last King of Scotland, was similarly a study in violent contrasts. (The film opens Friday in Toronto.)
"I was looking for that thing in Idi Amin. There are the dark areas, and then there are the positive areas, the competencies. I remember thinking I wish I could make this character more confident, more sure, more able to feel competent going into a room and be like, eh, I'm here!" Whitaker says. He leaves the sentence hanging and searching your eyes for a second, looking for some kind of confirmation for what he just said. His lazy eye is hardly noticeable in person.
Forest Whitaker (AFP/Getty Images)
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All of this doesn't remotely feel like a Hollywood star giving off false humility, or if it is this, it is an uncanny performance. He becomes more animated as he describes the struggle to capture these larger-than-life personas. "I talked to a shaman about this once, actually," he admits. "I said 'I'm so frustrated. Whenever I play these characters, I see my work, and I never like it. I always just see myself.'
"And he's like, 'What makes you think that when you are playing these characters, it's not true?' " Whitaker lowers his voice as if he were the shaman. " 'What makes you think that it's not another person? What makes you think that you haven't entered into another place, another dimension at that time, at that moment?
It's real. That moment, that character is completely alive.' "
Playing Amin helped Whitaker to continue to work through those old frustrations, he says. As you would expect, he did a great deal of research.
He read extensively about Amin, who is widely estimated to have had 300,000 Ugandans killed during his presidency from 1971 to 1979.
Whitaker also studied the Kiswahili language and, perhaps more important, worked to learn to speak English as if it were his second language, as it was for Amin. The film is based on Giles Foden's 1998 novel, and both the book and the film play with the facts surrounding certain foreigners close to Amin and his government. Yet Whitaker's portrayal of the leader was based heavily on historic accounts, including the actor's own talks with people who knew Amin -- his government ministers, his generals, even Amin's girlfriends. The 45-year-old actor also travelled extensively throughout the country, picking up sayings and the diverse Ugandan customs as he went.
"I was doing research up until the minute I finished," he says.
The film's co-star, James McAvoy, said in a separate interview that the 2½-month shoot was difficult and very workmanlike. There were few women on set, apart from Kerry Washington, who played one of Amin's wives, and a number of Ugandan women acting as extras. McAvoy plays a young Scottish doctor who arrives in Uganda, partly for the sheer adventure of going there, just as Amin is coming to power and, by sheer fluke, becomes Amin's personal doctor. McAvoy's character is actually a composite of three different people who were close to Amin.
As for Whitaker, "he was very much in character the whole time. . . . I never wanted to ask him or approach him about his [acting] method, his process, because if he was in character, I could take him out of it by asking him about it," McAvoy says. "It was very tense. But the amount of energy coming off of him was so amazing. The performance was so brilliant, all I had to do was bounce that energy back.
"It's interesting that when Forest would come on the set, the crew's shoulders would go up and they would all shit themselves. It was not about him being a prissy actor." It was that when Forest approached, here came Amin, McAvoy said.
When asked about this, Whitaker pauses. "I wasn't abusing people. But I was staying pretty much in the energy of the character. The whole thing wasn't an easy shoot." A lot simply had to do with the practicalities of shooting in Uganda, but a lot had to do with the characters.
"It's not so simple to break out [of character] and joke. You're torturing some person [in a scene]. I can't just -- at least I don't have the capability of leaving that and going over and making jokes."
He says this as if it's yet another thing he has to work out. All you can do is to try to appreciate the thought pattern. He's easily one of the most engaging thinkers about the acting process until, that is, something terrifying happens.
The conversation shifts to how Whitaker had to speak more from his diaphragm to sound like Amin. He slips into the voice. It's much bigger. Not louder. Bigger. His build becomes instantly more powerful. Just like McAvoy's character became mesmerized, you can't help being taken aback by the feeling that here is the volatile and violent Amin, whom you just watched for two hours in a dark cinema. Suddenly Amin is in the room with you.
It's terrific.
