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Forest Whitaker.

Article Excerpt
"What does it say about us as human beings when we listen to leaders who lie to us and, as a result, thousands of people are killed?"

I'm not normally affected by characters in movies, but your portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland scared the hell out of me.

I knew that I was playing a really intense character. He was brutal at times. I guess I didn't know what the effect would be on other people, or how it would be in the film. The other actors were uneasy and frightened, not knowing what was going to happen inside a scene, you know? And I think it really fed the movie.

How much of the part was on the page and how much of it did you pull together yourself?

When we were in Uganda, I talked to Kevin [Macdonald, the director] about incorporating some of the things [Amin] had said into my speeches. I also wanted to incorporate more Kiswahili into the playing of the character. Kevin was open to my doing that, so I just started adding in more and more Kiswahili phrases and colloquialisms. I worked on the accent in L.A., but being in Uganda, being with the Ugandan people, you find out the uses of words. It could be something as simple as "uh-huh," but when and why it's said really define who the character is.

How long did you shoot the movie in Uganda?

The actual shooting of the film there was two months, but I was there for three and a half months.

Had you been there before?

No, that was my first visit to the African continent.

What did you think of it? It looked just gorgeous.

It's so clean. The earth itself is so beautiful. The city of Kampala has kind of, like, a seventies retro vibe. And the people are so open and generous. They really invited us in and gave a lot of themselves in working on the movie.

A lot of people in Uganda today are old enough to have been around while Amin was in office.

[He was deposed] in 1979, so if you're in your thirties or forties or older, you had personal contact with him, because he was running the country. Even if you're a little...

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