Forest Whitaker Acting & loving it

By Frazier Moore

AP Television Writer

NEW YORK

Forest Whitaker is one ter- rific actor. From his start two decades ago in “Fast Times at Ridge-mont High,” he has logged powerful performances in such films as “Platoon,” “Bird,” “The Crying Game” and “Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai,” and in a season-long arc of the acclaimed TV drama “The Shield.” For his portrayal of mad Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 2006’s “The Last King of Scotland,” he won an Oscar for best actor.

But don’t think of Whitaker as only an actor. Think of him as a student — he does.

“Constantly, constantly,” he says in his disarming, feathery voice. “I like to continue to explore.”

Now for Whitaker the exploration is continuing on, of all things, a spinoff of the 6-year-old CBS procedural “Criminal Minds.”

In “Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior” (which premiered to a hit-size audience last week), Whitaker plays Special Agent Sam Cooper, who heads up an elite team of agents within the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, charged with capturing the nation’s most nefarious criminals (or at least some of the bad guys the other show doesn’t nab).

The new CBS series follows a tried-and-true storytelling formula. But Whitaker, who says he signed on early in the development process and helped shape his role, sees “Suspect Behavior” as a character study as much as a procedural.

“My character is trying to uncover light,” Whitaker says over diet colas in Manhattan last week. “He feels every person has inside of him a light, and he’s stripping away all the things that cover it in shadows so he can get to the source. And from that discovery, he hopefully can find a common ground.”

That’s a lot to expect for anybody — bonding one week with a lowlife who abducts little girls, another week with a psycho who gouges out the eyes of her victim.

But as Sam Cooper says to a colleague on the show, “You have to know them. Can’t be afraid.”

And in a future episode, even Cooper himself becomes the perpetrator.

“In a way, at least, I’m put in that position,” Whitaker confides. “The writers are confronting the question, ‘What are any of us capable of?’ If we can get understanding, we can find compassion, and if compassion occurs and grows big enough, theoretically you should find love. That’s what I’m really looking for: Where we’re all one thing.”

With that, he chuckles at himself and his lofty-sounding talk.

In person, the 49-year-old Whitaker doesn’t come across as an actor of kaleidoscopic proportions. At 6 feet and 2 inches, he is more like an oversized teddy bear, with a friendly manner, his distinctive drooping eyelid (he was born with it) and a blinding smile.

Born in Longview, Texas, Whitaker grew up in Los Angeles, where his success in high school football landed him an athletic scholarship at Cal State Fullerton. Then he transferred to the University of Southern California to study voice on a music scholarship. Then he made the shift to drama.

But along with what he learned in drama classes, he applied knowledge gleaned from martial arts and Eastern philosophy, which he began studying as a youngster.

He cites this lesson be borrowed from the dojo: “You should understand that everything doesn’t go in a straight line, that some things go down and up and move around in order to get to a target.

“Of any principle in acting,” says Whitaker, “I think of that more than anything else.”