White House butler sets Forest Whitaker on right track again

Put it down to the curse of the Oscar. As so many actors have discovered in the past, winning an Academy Award doesn't always guarantee you the pick of gilt-edged scripts. When Forest Whitaker took home the best-actor Oscar for playing Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 2006's The Last King of Scotland, it was no more than he deserved. And then? A series of forgettable roles in second-rate movies such as Vantage Point, Street Kings and Crossfire (aka Freelancers); Whitaker was left downcast and despondent.

"Up until two years ago I was thinking 'Maybe I don't want to do this anymore'," he says. You could hardly blame him. Sure, his film career which began with an appearance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) also includes a best-actor triumph in Cannes for playing jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood's Bird and has seen Whitaker working with major directorial names such as Martin Scorsese (The Color of Money), Oliver Stone (Platoon), Robert Altman (Prêt-à-Porter) and David Fincher (Panic Room).

Yet the fallow period after The Last King of Scotland hit hard. It didn't help that as an occasional director, his last outing in the chair was 2004's presidential comedy First Daughter, and his creative juices were drying up. Looking back, "I didn't think I was growing", he recalls sombrely. "I wasn't inspired by the roles I was playing. I couldn't jump to the next level. I felt like I was going backwards, not forward, in my work. I wasn't getting better, I was getting worse."

Thankfully, the 52-year-old actor has found his mojo once more, largely thanks to The Butler. The latest film from Lee Daniels (Precious, The Paperboy), it tells the story of Cecil Gaines, a character based on Eugene Allen, who served under eight presidents in the White House across 34 years. "I think it's some of the most specific work I've ever done in my career," says Whitaker, who got to play Gaines across six decades of his life.

"You see the transition of age and the difference and how the experiences have changed his life, where he carries his pain, how he starts to move differently, how he starts to behave. So I had to be very specific about all that, and make it come from an emotional place. If I'm physically moving differently, I needed to come from an emotional experience from my past. I let that shape my body. The way I grew older was shaped by my experiences in my life, so it was very specific."

Then there was the training to be a butler - a profession that's all about being specific. Whitaker invited a butler coach to stay at his house, and accompany him to the shoot in New Orleans. "I thought his philosophy was really interesting. I hadn't looked at service in the way that he did; the different ways of giving and giving with abundance - that was his motto. Never giving for equality, never giving to get something back, but to give, over and above, to bring joy … It was very powerful."

The story begins on the Georgia plantation where Gaines grows up, but it takes off when he wins a job in the White House, first serving under the Eisenhower administration (although in reality, Allen began at the tail end of the preceding Harry S. Truman's second term). As the presidents come and go, Gaines is a silent witness to some of the most momentous events in modern American history - from the Kennedy assassination to Vietnam and Watergate.