The Last King of Scotland - Preview
Preview by Jack Foley
IT’S been chosen as the opening film of The 50th Times BFI London Film Festival so expect to be hearing a lot about Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland in the coming weeks.
The film tells the story of a young Scotsman, Dr Nicholas Garrigan (The Chronicles of Narnia‘s James McAvoy), who becomes personal physician to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) at the height of his power in the 1970s.
At first seduced by Amin’s power and magnetism, Dr Garrigan eventually comes to realise the full extent of the atrocities committed by one of the world’s most notorious dictators.
In order to play the ruthless historical figure, Whitaker – whose performance is said to be amazing – learned to speak Swahili and to play the accordian. He even found some empathy with the person while researching what made him tick.
“When you play a character, you can’t think of him as a bad person; you try to understand the reasons,” he explained to Premiere magazine as part of their Fall season preview of US movies.
“There are ghastly things that happened, and 300,000 people died, but the whole point of why I became an actor was to [find the] internal spark that connects everybody together, and I find it in this dark figure.”
McAvoy’s character eventually becomes a reluctant hero – someone who has the chance to save the world a little. But he’s also portrayed as incredibly selfish and potentially quite stuipd – even going so far as to have an affair with Amin’s wife (played by Kerry Washington).
“Can you imagine going to bed with Hitler’s wife?” asks the actor. “Nicholas is incredibly stuipd. He’s all talk and no brains, a personification of the way a crumbling, corrupt, unworthy empire treated Uganda.”
The film will open in UK cinemas sometime after it receives its European debut on the opening night of the film festival.
Find out more about the festival