This Role Was Brutal

Forest Whitaker Tried to Humanize Tyrant Amin

NEW YORK

They always start as saviors, their skin shining in the African sunlight, their smiles wide as the Nile itself. The promises are bountiful. They will grow more beans and rice. They will build better housing. The naked children will be clothed.

The people, so tired of hurt and need, want desperately to believe. They gape in awe at the figure before them, dressed in a leisure suit, or a military uniform adorned with questionable medals, and hope that he will deliver.

But soon it comes: The fears that onetime allies are plotting against the state. That cabinet ministers cannot be trusted. There is paranoid whispering. Old cronies are jailed. Then there are disappearances. Soon, human skulls are discovered beneath mounds of dirt.

Among the men who conspired and deviled their way to the high-back chair of the post-colonial African leader, few were as strange, bizarre, hypnotic, wicked, heartbreaking and quotable as Idi Amin Dada, better known simply as Idi Amin, who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Before being run out of office, he was responsible for more than 300,000 deaths, inspiring tales of egomania, debauchery and even cannibalism.

"Consummate evil," agrees Forest Whitaker, who plays Amin in "The Last King of Scotland," a biopic that opens in Washington on Wednesday. Based on a 1998 novel by Giles Foden, it follows a fictional Scottish doctor who treats Amin's real and imagined ailments and witnesses the horrors that engulf Uganda, soon finding his own life in peril.

Whitaker, however, says he wanted to find nuance in the evil that was unleashed. "He's not Satan," he says of Amin. "He's not the devil. My search was to find the reasons he made the decisions that he did."

The 44-year-old actor is staring out a hotel room window. He swivels his head back around. A thought comes to him about a distinct Amin characteristic, which is partly why he says he could play the tyrant. "The 'definitiveness' of him," says Whitaker. "If someone said to him, 'I wanna go home,' he could say, 'You cannot.' "

Boom. Just like that.

Plenty of open fields over there for those who wanted to go home and didn't make it.

The actor is beefy, though not as hulking, as huge, as Amin. He's settled into an East Side hotel room sofa, wearing jeans, black suit coat and a gray shirt. Like a slew of accomplished character actors -- Wallace Beery, James Earl Jones, Ned Beatty -- Forest Whitaker could be your mailman, your car repairman, your electrician.

He burrowed into books and articles about African colonial history before trekking to Uganda to play Amin. He wanted to understand the ground from which Amin sprang. It was a Uganda ruled by the British during colonialism, and given up by the British without a physical fight when independence came. "I wonder if we can look at Africa without the context of intervention," Whitaker says. "There is a schism in African history, and Amin was a big product of it. He was rewarded by the British for fighting against the Mau Mau. He was sent to Sandhurst. He was put into power by the British."