'I want a challenge' — Forest Whitaker on Broadway debut

The actor, director and producer pulled them out of his backpack recently and all of them were battered, underlined and soaked in highlighter.

Whitaker this month stars in a Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Hughie," a short play about human connection that requires the actor to speak for an hour virtually nonstop.

Like O'Neill's more famous works such as Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh, ''Hughie deals with the pathetic illusions men create for themselves to fill their sad lives.

Tony Award-winning producer Darren Bagert, who helped lead the last Broadway revival of "Long Day's Journey Into Night," sent the script for "Hughie" to Whitaker in the hope of finally luring him onstage.

Whitaker plays Erie, a low-level gambler and spinner of tall tales about himself.

After graduating from the University of Southern California, he was in an improv show at the Mark Taper Forum and a musical at the Inner City Cultural Center, but then movies came calling, starting with "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."

[...] Whitaker's credits include Oliver Stone's "Platoon," Lee Daniels' "The Butler," Neil Jordan's "The Crying Game" and his Oscar-winning turn as Idi Amin in 2006's "The Last King of Scotland."

Whitaker, 54, knows he doesn't match O'Neil's vision of Erie, which calls for an actor with blue eyes, sandy hair and medium height.

"Color can't be wiped out — it's there, I'm a black actor — but you move past that into the minutia of the story itself and the spirits or souls of these particular people," he said.