Prolific actor and director Forest Whitaker may finally get that long-overdue Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. He tells Michael Dwyerhow a bit of digging revealed a different side to the man the world saw as a monster

BEING the frontrunner in the Oscars race has its drawbacks, not least because all the hype might convince voters that their support is superfluous, and there have been many instances where supposedly hot favourites fell at the final hurdle. Forest Whitaker has been scooping up awards from US critics' groups for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, but he was understandably reticent on the subject of Oscars when we met in London recently.

"I'm just happy that people like my work," he says, "and I hope that it helps this movie because this is a word-of-mouth movie. I'm just going to try and live in the moment."

Tall and heavy-set, Whitaker cuts an imposing figure in person, and he speaks in quiet, measured tones that suggest the image of a gentle giant. As Amin, however, he blazes up the screen.

Kevin Macdonald, the Glaswegian director of the Oscar-winning Munich Olympics documentary One Day in September, artfully blends fact and fiction in The Last King of Scotland, which is based on the novel by Giles Foden. It opens in 1970 as a young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), impulsively decides to practice at a small clinic in rural Uganda. His arrival coincides with the coup that brings Idi Amin to power, and when their paths cross, the dictator appoints Garrigan as his personal physician.

The movie is anchored in Whitaker's exuberantly intimidating portrayal of Amin as a man out of his depth as a national leader, making it up as he goes along, and resorting to mass homicide when he turns desperate. It's hard to imagine any other actor bringing such depth, presence and complexity to the role, but Whitaker admits that Macdonald initially had doubts about casting him.

"The producers sent me the book about five years ago, but the project fell apart," he says. "Then they came back to me about a year and a half ago, and they were looking for a Idi Amin. They were not offering me the part. They just wanted me to meet the director and see how he felt. I think Kevin had reservations about me, although he was very sure about James McAvoy. He had never seen me playing any character as explosive as Amin. We met and did a work session, which was an audition really. And it worked out."

Whitaker says he was familiar with only the most basic facts about Amin, and with the widely held view of him as a buffoon and an ogre. "All I knew was that he was supposedly this barbaric president-dictator - a bit like a cartoon figure, really. There were these stories of Amin being involved in cannibalism and blood rituals. I met many people who knew him, and no one said any of those stories were true.

"Some people in Uganda still speak of Amin with respect. Then there were other people who recognised that all these atrocities happened, but they were able to reconcile that with all the great things that happened the country while Amin was in power. I met a general who worked with him and he told me that, even though Amin killed his father, he did some wonderful things for their country. The more I talked to Ugandans about him, the more it helped me in deciding how I should play him."

As The Last King of Scotland begins, it seems to be yet another case of a film using a white outsider as a filter to illustrate the horrors of life under despotism in another country. "Yes, it starts from the point of view of Nicholas," Whitaker acknowledges, "but then the paradigm shifts. The heart of the movie is this friendship, or father-son relationship, that forms between the them."

Whereas the recent films dealing with the Rwanda genocide had to be shot in other countries, Whitaker felt it was essential for the Amin movie to be made in Uganda.

"I guess if we shot in the northern part of the country, we would have had problems, but we were shooting mainly in Kampala and the people were very generous, very co-operative. They seemed to want the movie to do well. Hardly any movies have ever been made there, although Mira Nair, who has a home in Uganda, shot some of Mississippi Masala there. She also shot Monsoon Wedding in her home in Kampala, even though it was set in India."

Whitaker immersed himself in preparation for playing Amin, reading voraciously on the subject, learning to speak Swahili and, against the wishes of the producers, travelling to the Amin family home in Arua in the northwest of Uganda.

"It was very important for me to meet his brother and sister." I went to the house where he was born, and it's a very different area to Kampala. The people are different, and their customs. It wasn't even what they said that mattered as much to me as being in the place where he came from, for me to sit there under a mango tree with his brother, in from of the home where he was born.

"The more I knew about Uganda, the more powerfully it resonated for me. Amin was Uganda. There's one scene in the film where he hugs Nicholas and he says, 'Uganda embraces you'. In Amin's mind, he really was Uganda, the father of his country, and in a Ugandan family, the father is a very powerful figure."

Whitaker says he found it impossible to switch off the character at the end of a day's shooting. "Every day I was preparing for the next day, doing homework, gathering more experiences, learning more and more about the character so that I could understand him better. I experienced some very special things: going to the tomb where the kings were buried, or sitting on the side of the road, drinking coffee and eating at a little shack, going to the market, going to the theatre. All those things were building my understanding of what Uganda was.

"People say I was in character, but what I was doing was continually searching to deepen the character, and I didn't let go of the things that I found. I stayed in the accent all the time. I was eating Ugandan food and most of my experiences were around Ugandan life. But I don't think I lost perspective."

Reflecting back on that experience, Whitaker says it changed his view of Africa. "Definitely, because I came to understood the country from the bottom up. It became a part of my system, a part of my blood. It gave me a different sense of my own ancestry.

"Because I was playing Idi Amin, who dealt with the colonisation issue, I became aware of this internalised conflict of what it means to be torn between cultures, what it means to be taken over by other cultures. So it became more of an organic process for me, which now informs the way I look at any place in the world where the West or any foreign forces are going in and trying to dictate how they should be and how they should live."

He speaks with a discernible passion for this subject. "It was amazing for me. I have to say that it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. When you are playing some parts, you can be more social with the other actors, but I did make great friends there and I learned a lot about myself, and about my work. I started to understand how to create a character where I can become invisible inside him as me, Forest. Basically, I learned how to marry the external with the internal."

Playing a real-life character carries a particular burden of responsibility, as Whitaker discovered when Clint Eastwood cast him as jazz musician Charlie Parker in the excellent 1988 biopic, Bird. "It is a responsibility you don't have playing fictional characters," he agrees. "I remember when we showed Bird in New York and one of Charlie Parker's wives, who had not been represented in the film, got up afterwards and she was so angry that she wasn't in it. Clint handled it very well and explained it was impossible to include every significant detail of a man's life in a two-hour film.

"Idi Amin's son is a general in Uganda and I wonder how he and his family will respond to this film. Whereas Bird had to leave out a lot of things, this film has many things that are fictionalised. Nicholas is a composite character, for example. So, if they choose, they can take offence to certain things, but I'm hoping that they'll feel their father is represented properly in the film. We don't shy away from showing any of Amin's brutality, but I believe it shows him as more complex than that."

Whitaker, who is 47 and from Texas, made his film debut down the credits of Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982 and had appeared in Platoon and The Color of Money before Eastwood gave him his breakthrough role in Bird.

"I hadn't done anything that would have made him think I was right for the part," Whitaker says. "I had a good role in The Color of Money, but it was just one scene really. I auditioned for Clint and he made the decision based on his gut instinct.

"He believed in me - more than I did at the time. Being on one of Clint's sets is very different to working with any other director. He's being working with the same crew for years and sometimes it's like they read each other's minds. The atmosphere on his set is so easy, so relaxed."

Whitaker's subtle, affecting portrayal of Charlie Parker earned him the award for best actor at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. "To get an award like that and to be put on the international stage changed my career. When I went back home, it made people think of me differently."

Two years later he was in Dublin, playing the soldier lover of the transvestite in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game. "We shot the early scenes in Ireland over about two weeks," he recalls. "I enjoyed working with Neil. I think he's really brilliant, especially on some of the smaller films he has made. They are so original. I loved Breakfast on Pluto last year. He had a real struggle getting the budget for The Crying Game, even while it was shooting, and then it became this big hit film. It was a great film."

In recent years Whitaker's output has been remarkably prolific, going from one film to another and playing recurring roles in two TV series. In The Shield he plays Lt Jon Kavanaugh. "He's an Internal Affairs guy sent in to destroy Vic Mackey and the strike team. He's extremely intense and driven to the max." And he has acted in several episodes in ER. "I play this very interesting, tragic character. He arrives at the hospital with pneumonia. They stick an IV through his chest and he has a stroke. Nobody takes responsibility, so he takes a doctor to court."

Whitaker has finished working on four feature films set for release later this year. Vantage Point, directed by Pete Travis, who made Omagh, is in the style of Rashomon as it observes a presidential assassination from different perspectives. The Air I Breathe is based on Chinese proverbs and is "going to be a special one", he says. "I play Happiness, Kevin Bacon plays Love, Brendan Fraser plays Pleasure and Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Sorrow."

In Ripple Effect, which co-stars Virginia Madsen and Minnie Driver, Whitaker plays a wheelchair-bound philosophy professor helping a hit-and-run driver deal with his guilt. "It was completely improvised, day by day, so it will be interesting to see how it turns out," he says.

Whitaker is especially enthusiastic about Where the Wild Things Are, a Maurice Sendak story scripted by Dave Eggers and directed by Spike Jonze.

"It's a puppet film and I do one of the voices. The puppets are amazing. We shot all the scenes as regular actors and there was a camera on each of us, following us around, and Spike and the puppeteers worked from that material. I think that it's a movie that adults will love as much as kids will. It's going to be like nothing you've ever seen before."

The Last King of Scotland opens next Friday