'Would you like some hummus?" Forest Whitaker asks me kindly. Hummus? With Forest Whitaker? You betcha. We sit in silence eating for a few moments, one occasionally offering the other appreciative smiles or olives from our respective sofas. It's 4.30pm in a room in Claridge's hotel, where he has been doing scores of five-minute television interviews to promote his new film, Vantage Point. "Well! There's something to tell the grandkids," I say finally. "What's that?" asks Whitaker, mouth gummy with dip. "Oh, nothing. Nice jacket, by the way." "Hey, thanks."
The jacket is black velvet, with silvery scrolls traced through it. The big man (he's 6ft 2in, and if I had a dime for every piece that described him as "bear-like", I could afford an amuse-bouche at Gordon Ramsay's restaurant downstairs) carries it with aplomb. It is a jacket that only a man with a spring in his step, hope in his heart and a dab of hummus on his pitta could carry off. Forest Whitaker has all of those things and more.
"Yeah, Denzel Whitaker gave me this," he says of the jacket. Who? Surely he means Denzel Washington? Oh dear, I think, the poor dope has lost the plot. Or he's gone and named a son after the other great African-American screen icon of our era, which is quite possible, given the creative approach to the naming of the other children in the Whitaker household. He and his wife, Keisha Nash, the actor Whitaker met on the set of Blow Away, have children called Autumn, Ocean, Sonnet and True. Keisha brought Sonnet and True to the family from a previous relationship, which must have made home life even more interesting than it was before.
But it turns out that there is a Denzel Whitaker who is not related to Forest Whitaker or Denzel Washington. He's a 17-year-old actor who stars in a new picture called The Great Debaters. Confusingly, it was directed by Denzel Washington and stars not only Washington but Forest Whitaker as little Denzel's dad. The real little Denzel was named after the real big Denzel. In The Great Debaters, little Denzel plays a member of an all-African American debating team that challenges those superior Ivy League jerks to joust after rhetorical joust. It is based on the true story of Melvin B Tolson, a professor at a Texan college, who in 1935 inspired his students to set up the college's first debating team and they got so good that they challenged Harvard in the American national championships.
"I play Denzel's father," says Whitaker. "I'm very conservative, I teach theology at the university and I deal with my son very strictly and then he starts to assert himself. It's about finding your own voice." In the film, little Denzel finds a surrogate spiritual father in big Denzel's professor, and thus has an oedipal conflict with Forest's character. On the plus side, Forest got a jacket out of the movie.
The Great Debaters tells a story we can all find inspirational. You don't have to be African-American to enjoy big Denzel and little Denzel sticking it to those stuck-up chinless wonders from Harvard, do you? Forest Whitaker gives me an eloquent sidelong glance that says (I suspect): "You know? It might help."
The film has been a modest success since its US release over Christmas. "It's not coming out here," says Whitaker sadly. "That's what I've been told. It's a great shame because it's one of my favourite films of the year. It deals with possibilities and hope. That's the kind of movie we need these days. A lot of films have no hope."
These are bleak times, I suggest, with bleak movies to match - take No Country for Old Men. "Oh, man! That film!" grins Whitaker. "The moment when the cop tells the sheriff: 'They come in and shoot up everybody. How do you fight that? There's nothing you can do.' You think - wow! It's bold because of that. A movie like that can make us say, 'No, we have to figure out a way,' you know?"
Which brings us nicely to Vantage Point, a thriller which might, just possibly, help us to figure out a way. Pete Travis, the Briton who previously directed Omagh, about the 1998 bombing in Northern Ireland, has made an ingenious and genuinely thrilling film, in which he depicts eight different strangers' points of view on the attempted assassination of an American president who - this is where the story gets dubious - is hosting a conference of national leaders in Spain attempting to unite the world against the evils of terrorism.
Whitaker plays a sad-faced everyman visiting Europe for the first time because he has fallen out with his wife back in the States. He happens to be filming the president's address in a square in Salamanca on his video camera. "My character represents an ordinary man who becomes touched, as Lincoln says, by 'the better angels of our nature'. Because he's an ordinary person who is losing his way and goes there to find his life again. By the end of it he finds he finds that his life isn't bleak and that the things he loves are his family and his kids. It's beautiful to see that."
In the aftermath of the president's shooting, Whitaker's character finds a Spanish girl who has lost her mother in the fleeing crowds. "This little girl bumps into me, starts crying and you see I have pity. It's not a lot, but it grabs you and puts you inside his story. He has to act and has to allow himself to have passion in his life." Whitaker's character has to redeem himself by doing two things: follow the men he thinks have shot the president, and - much more importantly - ensure that the little girl, the film's innocent symbol of hope, makes it through to the closing credits.
The film's most powerful scene comes when the girl runs across a road and the vicious, thinly drawn Arab terrorist (Said Taghmaoui, who, his arresting debut in La Haine notwithstanding, must get tired of playing such stereotypes) has a moment of compunction. He barrels towards the girl in a getaway truck. At that moment, the film's dizzying thrills and spills seize up and every character in the film (not to mention us in the audience) wills him to stop. The terrorist slams on the brakes. But does she survive? Does Forest fulfil his manifest destiny and save her? I won't tell.
"I swear, it makes me want to cry now," says Whitaker. "I wanted the terrorist side to be shown properly, and in that moment, it is. Pete says something very profound in that moment. That's why the movie is extremely optimistic because of the terrorist's behaviour at that point. Again, it's about the better quality in us."
Otherwise, though, the terrorist is an inhumane cipher. Whitaker doesn't agree with this, though he admits that a purely evil character would be a bad thing both dramatically and ethically. "It's abhorrent to me that somebody is just evil and you can't explain it," says Whitaker. I had asked him about a suggestion a US critic once made to the effect that Whitaker often gives the wicked characters he plays a gravitas and soulfulness that they don't deserve - such as his gangster in Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai in 1999, his burglar in David Fincher's Panic Room in 2000 or, most pertinently, his interpretation of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, for which Whitaker won the best actor Oscar last year.
"I think that's a falsehood," says Whitaker. "I don't make them better than they are. Certainly you may not want to forgive some deeds, but you have to understand them, and that's what interests me about playing evil characters." In one interview, he said he was determined not to play Amin as a cartoonish African dictator, adding: "He was a much more complicated figure - pro-African, anticolonial, and one of the few leaders who would ask the west and the Asians to leave so that Ugandans could take care of themselves."
He knows that there was more to Amin than that. "I'm fascinated by the capacity to be able to do harm. I struggle every day with the ability of people to do evil. Not just the big things - the petty things that people do in order to make someone feel small, when it's so easy to do and it hurts so much." His voice becomes hushed. "There's that image of a guy who has taken 10 years to make a painting and then someone tears it up in two seconds. You know what I'm saying?"
Whitaker is campaigning for Barack Obama to become the next US president. "I'm not standing idly by. We're at a crucial point in the evolution of the world. The Israel war has been going on for ever. The environment is imploding on itself. What I've been hearing while I've been over here - certainly in France and Spain - is that people see some hope with Obama that they don't see from any other presidential candidate." He isn't campaigning for him because he would be the first black president? "No. He represents something really new, I think. He's from a diverse background, he has a different heritage, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. He's a brilliant man who decided to work for the people."
Wouldn't he have preferred to play the president in Vantage Point? He'd have been better than William Hurt. "I have no interest in playing a president. It would have to be some story that drew me in." Good point: when black men play America presidents, they are usually too boringly saintly to be plausible (think Dennis Haysbert in 24). "It would definitely have to deal with a big character flaw or something. Otherwise, probably not. I don't have any interest in playing figures from history." Does he get a lot of offers of that kind? "I do, and most of the time I want to say, 'This person is too big for you. This person is bigger than your notion of them.' "
He would like to play Louis Armstrong, the great jazz trumpeter, who was regarded by some as an Uncle Tom who betrayed African-Americans by trying to appeal to white audiences, and by not supporting the civil rights movement strongly enough. Whitaker has already played one great jazz musician, winning a best actor award at Cannes in 1988 for his performance as bebop genius Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood's film Bird, so why Armstrong? "Because he was demonised by his own community. These stories are interesting because they deal with the expectations and the compromises someone has to make." Whitaker empathises with Armstrong in his missteps: "Just because it is easy for me to step into this room, doesn't mean that it was easy for someone else before me."
The other historical figure Whitaker would like to play is Frederick Douglass, the great American editor, author and abolitionist who was born a slave in 1819. Why? "Because he was so many unexpected things. Douglass was a paradox of a man. That's what makes him interesting. He was a liberal conservative and, like Martin Luther King, committed to change through nonviolent means."
But it's probably just as well that there are no scripts yet for these roles. "My problem is I'm obsessive. I can't take on these big roles very often. They change me too much." Whitaker dives into these big lives every decade or so and resurfaces months later, often equipped with a new skill such as playing the sax (which he learned for Bird) or speaking Swahili or playing the accordion (for The Last King of Scotland). "I carry my characters around. When I finished playing Amin, I had a long shower to try to get rid of him. I'm not sure it worked."
Whitaker has always been like that. "College football, acting, opera singing - I approached them all in the same obsessive way." It turns out that Whitaker is an accomplished tenor. He can probably accompany himself on the accordion as he sings Nessun Dorma in Swahili - and he could also rough up any neighbours who dared to complain about the noise (he's a black belt in karate, too).
He is also an actor who has been through a mid-career crisis. "There was a point a few years ago when I worried about what I was putting into the world, whether it was about me." This may or may not be a reference to his performance in the worst film he has ever been in, namely the 2000 Scientology flick Battlefield Earth, in which he wore a wig so big and so wrong that he looked like a transvestite alien at an Amy Winehouse lookalike party. "I needed to recharge," he says.
Quite unexpectedly, he started to work in TV, starring in ER and the cop show The Shield. Given Whitaker's background (born in Texas, raised in south central LA), the decision to play a detective in the latter was unexpected. "I come from a background where cops killed my relatives. One time I got thrown across the hood of a car by a cop. I guess at some level I appreciate that police officers have to exist." So what was he doing in The Shield? "I was trying to grow. It was what I needed to do." A spate of acting jobs have followed: opposite Keanu in a James Ellroy adapation called Street Kings, next to Jude Law and RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan in Repossession Mambo, in which he plays a repo man taking back artificial organs from defaulters' bodies (hearts, lungs, etc), and others too numerous to mention. He has certainly recharged; maybe he has grown.
The career crisis also meant that Whitaker stopped directing films for a while. His directorial oeuvre is rather fluffier than his acting one. It ranges ranging from the adaptation of Terry Macmillan's buppie feminist novel, Waiting to Exhale, to a series of blameless chick flicks (including Hope Floats with Sandra Bullock, and First Daughter with Katie Holmes).
He is now returning to direct something meatier, possibly in Uganda. "I'm hoping to direct a project loosely based on the photographer Kevin Sites, on a guy who goes into the hot zones to shoot wars and famines. It's about when he decides to stop filming and cross to the other side." He says the story will also draw some details from the life of Kevin Carter, a member of the so-called Bang Bang Club of South African photojournalists, aiming to expose the brutality of apartheid in the townships. "He took a Pulitzer-winning photograph of a girl in Sudan and afterwards everybody kept asking him, 'What happened to the girl?' He didn't know. It came to haunt him that he didn't help the girl who looked as though she was dying of starvation. And then he committed suicide."
The twist is that Whitaker is considering directing himself in the lead role - even though Sites is, and Carter was, white. One can see why the role would captivate Whitaker. "It's about the lost of innocence and the recovery of innocence; what happens when someone puts the camera down and stops being an observer." It sounds like a big challenge even for Whitaker. "I guess. I'm only 46, and I want to keep growing."
It's nearly time for me to stop being Forest Whitaker's hummus buddy. "I put down the camera long ago, you know? I was here in London aged 19 and I was obsessed with my camera, shooting everything I could. Then someone stole it. It helped me to see things for the first time." So what does he do on vacation nowadays? "I don't really shoot on video. I'm nothing like the guy I play in Vantage Point. What I do is touch things." While he was shooting The Last King of Scotland in Uganda, he took a trip to a forest where there was a cave made from the roots of a tree. "This is where they say the first man lived. And I'm sitting there with my shoes off, thinking: 'Touch the ground, man. Don't forget it. Let it be inside of you.'
"I do it with my children because I think things have energy. If you touch them, you understand them and you get their history."
· Vantage Point is released tomorrow
