Whitaker’s been picking up awards and nominations left, right and centre for his turn as Ugandan dictaor Idi Amin in this week’s The Last King of Scotland, so far cleaning up for Best Actor with many of the US Critics’ awards.
Unsurprisingly, given all the praise, he’s got a fair few more – typically varied – projects in the works, from animated baseball family comedy Everyone’s Hero (the last directorial effort of former Superman Christopher Reeve) to a return to the world of fashion that he last visited in Pret a Porter for the drama Ripple Effect, about a fashion designer going through a crisis of confidence.
Then there’s more typically quirky, Indy-fick Whitaker fare, like The Air That I Breathe, based on an old Chinese proverb and starring Kevin Bacon as “Love”, Brendan Fraser as “Pleasure” and Sarah Michelle Gellar as “Sorrow” – Whitaker will play “Happiness”. Or perhaps another big budget potential blockbuster, like Vantage Point, a thriller about an attempted assassination of the American President told from five different perspectives (in a deliberate attempt to mimick the classic Kurasawa pic Rashomon).
Most worth looking forward to, though, is the next outing from screwball director Spike Jonze – Where the Wild Things Are. Based on the popular children’s story about a young boy who creates his own forest world inhabited by fabulous creatures, if they can get the animation right, this could prove to be something very special indeed. If you know the books, Whitaker will be voicing Wild Thing – which could well work very nicely.
Pocket Films Blog 