Forest Whitaker & Armando Iannucci

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Jesse Thorn

Society & Culture

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2018

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, some heavy hitters! First, Forest Whitaker. He's of course the star of *countless* great movies. He's got this knack for taking huge figures from history and portraying them complex, fascinating, sometimes really fragile people. He played Charlie Parker in Bird, won an Academy Award for playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. Now, he's starring as Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the new film The Forgiven. He talks with Jesse about getting to know Archbishop Tutu as a character and a friend over the years. Plus, hot takes on Battlefield Earth! Then, Armando Iannucci. He's a brilliant comic writer - he created Veep, In The Loop, The Thick of It. And in all of those projects, he's found most of his material in the vain, ambitious and insecure people who run democracies - UK cabinet ministers in The Thick of It, presidential wannabes in Veep. His latest project is called "The Death of Stalin" and it's about, well, Stalin. How do you make a comedy based on a guy like that? Listen to find out! Finally, Jesse tells you about The Coup, a group that puts a human side to hard line, radical political rap.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:13.1	I'm Jesse Thorn. Armando Ianucci is a writer and director. He kind of specializes in finding
0:19.5	comedy in broken political systems and the people who run them. And he's found most of
0:24.2	his material in the people who run democracies. UK cabinet ministers in the thick of it,
0:29.8	presidential wannabes in Veeb. His latest project is called The Death of Stalin. And it's
0:36.2	about the death of Stalin. So how do you laugh at a guy like that? Well, you do some research.
0:44.9	And we found out that they circulated joke books, jokes about Stalin and Barrier, who was
0:50.6	Stalin's chief head of security, jokes about torture and rape and all sorts. And you could
0:58.5	be short if you had one of these joke books on it. And yet somehow the need to make a joke
1:03.4	about it almost as if to say, you haven't got me yet. If I can make fun of you, then you
1:09.4	haven't taken away my mind or my spirit. It's Bullseye.
1:22.6	Coming up more from one of my favorite comedy writers ever, Armando Ianucci. He says,
1:27.3	The death of Stalin is a film about a power struggle between five terrible people. But every
1:34.3	one of them pretty much thinks that he is fighting the good fight. People don't wake up saying,
1:40.6	what evil thing will I do today? They wake up going, what will I do today? And it's just their
1:46.4	predisposition or their miscontrude set of values that makes them do something which they
1:54.4	think is in their terms perfectly fine, actually, morally, objectively. He's completely
2:00.8	wrong. But first, movie star, forest, Whitaker. He's been acting for over 30 years now. This
2:06.7	is one many, many awards. So when did he decide that acting was the career for him? I don't
2:13.2	think I really decide I was going to be an actor until about maybe eight years into my
2:17.8	career, you know? Also, he starred alongside John Travolta in Battlefield Earth. Do you remember
2:25.0	Battlefield Earth? It's a terrible movie. Forest Whitaker does. He says the haters should
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