BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ Academy Award-winning actor Forest Whitaker had been acting for 25 years before he felt he was really up to the task.
"I decided I wanted to try to do it my second year of college," he says. "But it was after I worked for years and years actually, maybe after 'Bird' even _ it was a long time into my career. I was testing it out for a long time wondering: Is this what I'm supposed to do? Is this where my destiny is? Am I going to be good enough to be able to make this my life's work?"
His role as jazz sax player Charlie Parker in "Bird" may have won him best actor at the Cannes Film Festival. "I was really proud I'd done it, but I couldn't watch it at first," Whitaker says. "I know it sounds crazy, but I think it was 'The Last King of Scotland' that made me say, 'OK, I can do it.'"
He won an Oscar for "Last King." Despite that, Whitaker says: "All that time I kept struggling, saying, 'How can I disappear and just let the character be there? Just be so deep into it that when people look at it they see THAT?' That's when I learned about something that I didn't know if it was possible to vibrate change so much, a certain way of thinking that people don't even see you _ they see just the person (you're playing)."
The 58-year-old actor, who has essayed everything from tough cops to Desmond Tutu, says he began to lose his zeal for performing about seven years ago. "I stopped being passionate and feeling it the way I wanted to,' says Whitaker.
"And I just couldn't really create. I wasn't doing good work. I was just working and continued to work hoping and expecting that something might happen; (I was) without joy," he says.
"There was a period of time, five years, when I was just like, 'I'm not doing anything good. What am I doing? Not working the way I want to.' But the last few roles have been rejuvenating for me," he nods.
One of those roles is the part of crime boss Bumpy Johnson in Epix's new series, "Godfather of Harlem," premiering Sunday. Based on real events, Johnson returns after 10 years in prison to find his former kingdom in shambles and the Genovese crime family his deadly rivals.
Whitaker, who grew up in Compton and later attended college on a football scholarship, is now working the way he wants to. His dad, an insurance salesman, transplanted the family from Texas to Los Angeles when he was little. "When my parents first moved to L.A. we moved to south-central L.A.," he recalls.
"I was about 11 and we didn't have any money. They couldn't get me a nickel allowance, but I didn't really see it that way. I didn't see myself as poor. It was only later I realized that if you can't get a dime to go buy something, then maybe you have financial issues," he laughs.
He attended Ralph Bunche Elementary School, but his mom sent him across town to junior high because of the gang activity in Compton. She was a teacher, the mother of four, who earned her bachelor's and two master's degrees. Whitaker thinks he inherited some of his fiber from her. "I come from a family of preachers or teachers on both sides of my family, so I used to go to church every Sunday," he remembers.
"And I wasn't sure. So I said to my mom, 'I don't see why I have to believe what you believe, I don't want to go.' My mom said, 'You don't have to believe what I believe, but you have to believe in something.' That was a big change in my life. I think it made me look at things like: What do you believe in? What are you willing to die for? It changed everything. I'll never forget that. I was 9 years old."
He was also very close to his older cousin when he was a kid. "I remember my cousin going off to the Vietnam War and then coming back different. That really affected me. He was injured, only mentally. Mentally it destroyed him and made him become like an alcoholic and not able to exist in the regular world. That was a big deal," he pauses.
"There was a character in the magazines called Winky. It was like a deer. My cousin used to draw these for me, and I would take them to school and act like I did them. They assumed it was me and I was, 'Oh, OK.' Then after he came back from Vietnam, I'd say, 'You don't understand, my COUSIN did this.' It changed the way I was doing things."
Separated from Keisha Nash, his wife of 22 years, Whitaker has four kids, three with her and one stepdaughter.
One thing that has always fascinated him about his work is it enables him to pursue learning. "I like continuing to explore the human condition through these characters that I play," he says. "I walk in the world, and I'm a student all the time. It's an unusual position to be able to say, 'OK, I'm playing a dictator and I need to go be with his family in the north and talk to the parliamentarian, and I need to go learn this language, or that.' It's unusual. And then to examine what makes them tick, what created them, it expands your awareness of life."
HEATON GETS THIRD ACT IN 'SECOND ACT'
After stints in "Everybody Love Raymond" and "The Middle," actress Patricia Heaton says she had no idea what she'd do next. Then along came the role in "Carol's Second Act," premiering on CBS Thursday. Heaton plays a middle-aged woman fulfilling her lifelong dream of attending medical school and suffering all the sticks-and-stones the position would prompt.
"My kids are pretty much out of the house, and my second long-running show was done, and I was feeling a bit at sea not knowing what I was doing," she says.
"I'm no longer a full-time mom, and I don't have a job as an actress, and I very much felt the things that a person like Carol would feel: 'Who am I without these things?'
"It was a while after 'The Middle' had finished, maybe a year even, and so I had time to feel those feelings that Carol was feeling, and it's been interesting to go on this journey with everyone and with Carol and explore that," she says.
"And it's interesting because I think it's important at any time in your life to keep challenging yourself. And just in the last two days, I've started having those actors' nightmares _ even at this stage of the game _ where I'm driving on Vine, and I stop my car in the intersection, and I can't get my hands out of my pocket, and I have to abandon the car because I'm supposed to be at a table-read that I actually miss. That was last night. So I think it's a good sign that I'm excited about this. It's a challenge ..."
CREATOR REDEFINES 'THE GOOD PLACE'
"The Good Place" returns for its final season on NBC Thursday. Executive producer Michael Schur says the path of the series changed as time went on. "I pitched the show as an investigation of what it meant to be a good person, and I found, over the course of working on it with the writers and the actors and the entire crew, that that's even a more complicated question than I think I thought it was," he says.
"I thought at the beginning that the show could, if given the chance, describe what it meant to be a good person. That was my hope. And that didn't mean 'do this and not that.' It meant here's what a good person looks like in the world. Here's how a person can feel like if he or she led a good life ...
"I think that objective kind of shifted a little bit," he says, "because what we found, as we discussed it and wrote it and executed it, is that some very, very smart people over the last, say, 3,000 years have had a lot of very different opinions about that question.
"And so what the mission of the show then became was to say, 'OK, we're going to give you a bunch of options. You can try to be a good person this way, or you can try to be a good person this way.' And what we ended up saying was we're going to present a bunch of options, and by the way, there are plenty more that we didn't describe, but what's important is that you try one of them."
NEW PRIVATE EYE ARRIVES WEDNESDAY
Cobie Smulders ("How I Met Your Mother") is action-packed as an ex-Marine who becomes a tough private eye in Portland on ABC's new series "Stumptown," premiering Wednesday.
The mother of two daughters, Smulders was diagnosed with ovarian cancer 12 years ago and underwent several surgeries to remove the tumors.
Today she says, "I think that going through that has made me a better person, a better mother. I certainly am able to tap into things, in terms of creating characters, but I think that the general overall gift _ if cancer can give you a gift _ is being grateful for being here. And being able to have gone through something like that makes you, when other things bubble up that are trying, you go, 'Well, it wasn't that. It wasn't that. I am not in that hospital anymore.' So I am now in a grateful place with it."
