American - Actor | July 15, 1961 -
You have to ask if the country would have been ready for Barack Obama if we hadn't been prepared by Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. If they hadn't already been in positions of enormous power and influence - secretary of state, secretary of defence - you know what I mean?
Forest Whitaker
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I'd spend every summer in Longview on my grandfather's farm. It was a tiny little town divided by a river, which was the segregation line: that side white, this side black. And meanwhile, I lived in Compton - basically, another whole world sealed into 10 square blocks. It's interesting how insular an environment can be.
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You try to pull away the experiences until you get to the core of humanity, and you find that light that exists in everybody. It's that light that I'm searching for in all of my work - is that connective thing, that ether that enters all of us - you know what I mean? That's a part of God.
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I try to live my life in a holistic way, show that all of it intersects because I'm coming from the same place. Now, at the core of it, I'm just trying to connect and be there, so I'm trying to be there for my family, my wife, my kids, my friends.
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I stay true because whatever the project is, I'm still looking for inside of that character. It's the thing that connects him to me and to everybody else. So, the search is the same. It's to unveil the truth, and that's how I stay true, because my purpose isn't altered.
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It's a contract of connection to be in the same space and watch and listen to stories and be caught in them. When you're in a theater, your brain expands because somebody in the theater may do something or respond to something that you wouldn't have.
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I submerged myself in all the information that I could find about Idi Amin. I mean, before I left Los Angeles, I was studying Kiswahili. I was working on the dialect. I was studying every documentary and tape of him that I could find - not just visual, but also audiocassettes, even in other languages when he was speaking in other dialects.
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I had been playing really interesting roles before I got great roles. Little ones - 'The Crying Game' I loved working on, and then 'Bird,' 'Ghost Dog,' so many films.
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It's hard for me to judge my own films as an artist sometimes. But as an artist, I did feel a fulfillment working on them, you know?
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The key is that I'm trying to keep growing and trying to keep learning and deepen my connection in every way, in my life, in my work. That's what I do when I look at a role.
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I think I've made some choices that maybe I wasn't so sure about for some reason or another. But I'm one of the lucky ones. Even when I was young, I played Bird, and that's a role people wait for their whole lifetime.
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I'm always surprised when an actor goes so deeply into the truth that they shake you to your core.
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