In general, he rules

NEW YORK -- Never let it be said that Forest Whitaker is a slacker when it comes to researching his film roles. To capture the aura of jazzman Charlie Parker in 1988's ``Bird," the actor sequestered himself in a Los Angeles loft with only a bed, couch, and saxophone. For director Jim Jarmusch's mystical ``Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai" (1999), he immersed himself in Eastern philosophy and meditated for hours at a time to hone his inner spiritual hitman. No previous character study, however, quite compares to what Whitaker undertook to play the charismatic Ugandan despot Idi Amin in ``The Last King of Scotland," opening Wednesday. Adapted from the 1998 Giles Foden novel, the harrowing film fleshes out the love-hate relationship between Amin and the fictional Dr. Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), a happy-go-lucky Scot who is appointed Amin's personal physician.

``I've played real characters before and I've done accents before, but the combination of skills necessary for this movie -- learning Swahili and mastering the dialect, figuring out [Amin's] history and what it's like to be African, learning the accordion -- it was a lot," says the soft-spoken Whitaker, 45, resting in a Midtown Manhattan hotel. ``Actually, the accordion wasn't so bad. In fact, it taught me how to breathe for the character."

But not content with just picking up on Amin's physical traits and talents, Whitaker also moved to Uganda a month before production began to plough through endless newsreels (``Because he was such a showman, he always invited the press to come see him"), interview the ex-ruler's family, friends, cabinet members, and generally make the country ``part of his blood."

The dedicated actor says he also decided not to break character once filming began. ``I had to maintain [Amin's] energy and vibe because it wasn't an easy thing to drop in and out of. I tried to do it once, by dropping my accent at a party, but then it took me three days to get the accent back!"

``Forest was just living, eating, breathing, sleeping Amin, " says Kevin Macdonald, an Oscar-winning documentarian (``One Day in September " ) making his feature debut with ``Last King." ``He immersed himself so much in the role I was almost worried for his sanity."

Macdonald's concern was legitimate. Amin, an ex-solider from Britain's colonial African troops, overcame modest beginnings to rise through the ranks of the Ugandan army, eventually appointing himself president after a British-backed coup d'etat in 1971. A mercurial personality, Amin was known as much for his charisma as he was for his paranoia, megalomania, and sadism. Responsible for the death of more than 300,000 of his countrymen, the ``Butcher of Uganda" fled the country in 1979 and died in exile in Saudi Arabia in 2003.

``Amin is a lot more external than many of the characters I've played," says Whitaker. ``Ultimately, he's a soldier. That's what he knew, that 's what he trained for, that's what he spent his life doing. I think he tried to rule the country as a soldier, and protected himself from what he perceived to be his enemies in the only way he understood."

Amin remains a controversial figure in Uganda, something that made Macdonald's decision to shoot the movie in the country -- the first since John Huston's ``The African Queen" in 1951 -- a technical nightmare. Luckily, President Yoweri Museveni gave his blessing to the production after meeting with Macdonald, Whitaker, and the producers, who assembled and trained a production crew from the country's limited television and theater talent pool.

``We even shot in the Parliament building while they were in session and holding the most important constitutional debate in the history of the country," says Macdonald. ``We were upstairs, while they were downstairs. It was a privilege, really."

Both artists' quest for authenticity paid off. The political thriller, shot over the course of eight weeks for roughly $6.4 million, was praised at both the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, Whitaker's performance in particular. Ironically, while the actor and the role seem like a perfect fit now, Macdonald needed to be convinced.

``Maybe coming from a documentary background, authenticity was important to me and I originally thought we would have an African play the part," says Macdonald, who auditioned actors on three different continents before being wowed by Whitaker in Los Angeles. ``Forest has generally played more gentle, childlike, internal roles, and so when he first came in to talk to me about Amin, I told him I did not see him in the part. So he came back and read the scene where Amin turns on Nicholas for the first time and it was terrifying and explosive and just out of this world. It felt like the violence of Amin was literally in the room that day."

Whitaker had no such qualms about Macdonald.

``Yeah, he didn't have to convince me, although he'd never directed a feature film before," says Whitaker with a laugh. ``He thought I was this gentle guy, which people do talk about a lot, but I think it's just that so many of my characters have this humanity to them."

After 24 years in the industry, Whitaker certainly has played his fair share of humane and inhumane characters. Born in Longview, Texas , and raised in Los Angeles by an insurance-salesman father and schoolteacher mother, the high school football star ditched his jersey and helmet after catching the acting bug in a production of Dylan Thomas's ``Under Milk Wood."

Dramatic arts scholarships at the University of Southern California and the Drama Studio of London quickly followed, as did the 6-foot-2 star's first noticeable role as, coincidentally, a football player in Amy Heckerling's ``Fast Times at Ridgemont High" in 1982.

Small but juicy parts in big movies (``Platoon," ``The Color of Money," ``Good Morning, Vietnam") kept Whitaker on Hollywood's radar, but it wasn't until his searing turn as Parker in Clint Eastwood's ``Bird" that he broke through. The role earned him a Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival, and thanks to subsequent roles in a diversified slate of movies, such as a kidnapped British soldier in ``The Crying Game" and a gay fashion designer in ``Pret-à-Porter," he has since maintained his critic's darling status (his evil, dreadlocked giant alien in ``Battlefield Earth" notwithstanding). As the head of Spirit Dance Entertainment, Whitaker has also developed a number of touchy-feeling films he's directed himself, including ``Waiting to Exhale" and ``Hope Floats."

And he has no intention of slowing down. In front of the camera, Whitaker has just completed his part as Ira, a wild rumpus-provoking monster in Spike Jonze's half-puppet, half-CGI adaptation of Maurice Sendak's ``Where the Wild Things Are," due in 2008.

He's also just wrapped a role as a tourist in next October's ``Rashomon"-like thriller ``Vantage Point," with Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox. And most intriguingly, he plays Happiness in tyro filmmaker Jieho Lee's ``The Air I Breathe," a psychological mind-bender of a project he talks about gushingly. ``I play Happiness, and I meet Pleasure (Brendan Fraser), have a little tryst with Sorrow (Sarah Michelle Geller), and finally meet up with Love (Kevin Bacon)."

On the small screen, the busy actor is wrapping up his acclaimed role as the calculating Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh on FX's ``The Shield," and then it's off to ``ER" for five episodes as ``a guy who has pneumonia but then has a stroke, and sues the hospital. In the process, he loses his wife, his kids, his everything."

Behind the camera, Whitaker has two projects in development. The first concerns real-life boy genius Adragon De Mello, who graduated from college at age 11. The second is a drama about Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, which despite its similarities to ``Last King," is receiving the full research treatment in development. Whitaker wouldn't have it any other way.