FOREST WHITAKER

SUPPORTING CHARACTER ACTOR QUICKLY MOVED INTO LEADING BIOPIC ROLES

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

An obscure part in the near background of an iconic Vietnam war film rolled into one of the greatest careers of a supporting character actor.

Directors need supporting characters in the plot reversal scenes who are dispensable to the overall outcome of the story. Supporting characters are often necessary to help the lead actor move on from difficult circumstances and bring the entire story to a suspenseful ending.

Those important background actors often become quickly forgotten, but by the time Forest Whitaker was done brightening his rising star, Disney cast him as rebel leader Saw Gerrera in the Star Wars independent film, Rogue One (2016) starring Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso, and Diego Luna as Cassian Andor.

Gerrera is an important intermediary, so trusted in the rebel alliance that he is brought for safe keeping the secret flaw designed into the Death Star. Gerrera dug in and fought the fight.

Disney/Lucas Films Producer Kathleen Kennedy was not the first Hollywood titan to cast Whitaker in a pivotal role.

Oliver Stone cast Whitaker in an ensemble cast put together for his coming out party as director in Platoon (1986). Stone was dead on the mark filling his film with the stars of the future before himself experiencing a flourishing of artistry beginning that same year with Salvador (1986), then going on to release Wall Street (1987), Talk Radio (1988), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), The Doors (1991), JFK (1991) and every year or couple of years thereafter until Snowden (2016).

Whitaker appears as the affable soldier in contrast to the contemptuous and miserable and sinical ones tired of fighting a war without any redemptive qualities in Southeast Asia.

Whitaker then moves forward from the background when Martin Scorsese casts him in the plot reversal scenes in The Color of Money (1986).

Paul Newman, Tom Cruise and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio play a team of pool sharks. Newman coaches Cruise, and Mastrantonio provides moral support. When Newman’s character, Eddie, has thoughts of going on tour by himself, he breaks off and plays a few games at the local pool hall on his own.

Eddie wins a few games, but then he starts to lose quite a bit to Amos, played by Whitaker. Amos out hustles Eddie, but Eddie is undeterred and only gets emboldened by the humiliation. The Color of Money then goes from one narrative about Eddie, Vincent and Carmen into two narratives as the characters go their separate ways only to play off against each other at the big pool tournament.

Just a year later, in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) Whitaker has a major supporting role costarring with lead actor Robin Williams. Williams plays a DJ for the military radio in Vietnam. Whitaker plays William’s sort of aide-de-camp.

Williams solidifies his transition from television sitcoms to major motion pictures, and Whitaker gets cast in a leading role about a legendary Black American musician.

Director Clint Eastwood gives Whitaker a break-through role as the lead actor when casting for the role of Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker in Bird (1988).

Whitaker shows an acting range worthy of star status, portraying Parker not only as a temperamental musical genius, but as a family man and a person with some mental health issues that get in the way of everything.

Parker was a highly regarded musician although the critical success was not reflected in financial success.

Whitaker shows how Parker struggled on many levels while becoming one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time.

In Bird, Whitaker shows he has one of those characters that can play either side of the moral divide and blossom as a result. Whitaker can play small in a supporting role, but he can also play a range of emotions in leading roles.

In Panic Room (2002) Jodie Foster and Kirsten Stewart star as mother and daughter moving into a New York Brownstone after dividing up family assets from a divorce. The son of the former owner comes back to claim an inheritance hidden in the family safe.

Whitaker plays Burnham, a soft hearted safe cracker. Burnham’s accomplices flip into psychopathic rages when they discover the house has already been occupied.

Whitaker plays the honest thief struggling with the moral dilemma of an attempted robbery falling sideways into a home invasion and the accompanying violence.

Whitaker has become an accomplished and well recognized supporting character actor by this time, finding and choosing roles for the screen personality he has developed. And Whitaker goes deep into that character for the role.

The simple low ranking army soldier to the complicated innocent thief moves into the cabaret musician and the political leader, changing the screen image ever so slightly depending on social class, language, even dialect and the leading costar.

Whitaker develops his screen persona so that he can perform on a spectrum of different roles in major motion pictures.

Director Kevin MacDonald casts Whitaker as African leader Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland (2006). The performance was so dynamic and complicated that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences awarded Whitaker the Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar.

MacDonald casts Whitaker with James McAvoy, Gillian Anderson and Kerry Washington.

McAvoy’s character is a doctor who travels to Uganda to work in a medical clinic. But the doctor catches the eye of the president, and he soon becomes the personal physician and confident to Idi Amin.

Whitaker portrays Amin as a strong but temperamental leader who gradually becomes unwound and more and more irrational, although there exists a sneaking suspicion that he was always so.

Whitaker dials his character up quite a bit playing next to McAvoy and Washington. Amin may have shown a soft heart, but Whitaker shows him with a manic depressive side that frequently ends in homicidal delusions.

In Repo Man (2010) Whitaker costars with Jude Law in a futuristic world in which artificial organs are bought and sold on the open market. Jake and Remy are hired to do piece work in reclaiming organs when their owners default on the payments.

Whitaker dials his character down to play a strong, but supporting character to that of Law’s.

Jude Law’s screen character is often so rational and caring with a soft heart. And Whitaker is able to perform a strong role but not overbearing, as Jake and Remy pop in and out of scenes like old college buddies finding work together.

Whitaker has become this likable guy, but also one in which the audience is always so surprised when finding out the full extent of his true film identity.

In Rogue One, he is a well respected rebel leader as mysterious and complicated as the few words spoken: ‘bugallie’. In Repo Man, he is a hard working artificial organ harvester.

Whitaker is a bit of both in the three season television series, Godfather of Harlem (2019-2023) as Ellsworth ‘Bumpy’ Johnson. Bumpy is a biopic character from the days Harlem was one of the worst livable neighborhoods in the world.

Bumpy controlled Harlem’s drug business and negotiated with other gangsters for control of his little part of big city New York.

Whitaker delivers another artful performance in a leading role, playing the street tough gangster with a soft heart.

Godfather of Harlem’s main narrative of gangsters and the drug trade is intertwined with several parallel narratives about the national leadership seeking to transform Harlem in the 1950s and 1960s, including Malcom X and Congressman Adam Clayton.

Whitaker puts on a Harlem accent with his gangster suit to interact with the Italian gangs running the rest of Harlem and everywhere else in the city. Whitaker is entirely believable as Bumpy, just as he was as Amin with a Ugandan accent and in the few scenes as Gerrera on a collapsing planet.

Whitaker over the years remains entirely likeable even when the characters are much more complicated playing really bad guys, which shows the depth of his acting art in a rich black culture.