Forest Whitaker has received his fair share of Oscar buzz for his turn in Lee Daniels' The Butler, playing an African-American man who works in the White House and dotes on his bosses, despite criticism from his politically aware son. In the wake of that success, Whitaker is moving on to Powell, where he'll play an African-American man who works in the White House and dotes on his bosses, despite criticism from a politically aware public.
The film concerns Colin Powell, George W. Bush's first Secretary of State, and will focus on that pivotal moment of Powell's 2002 speech to the U.N., in which he dramatically claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and sacrificed his sterling reputation in the service of Bush's desire to invade at all costs. Powell comes from screenwriter Ed Whitworth, who's made a cottage industry out of dramatizing recent history. As previously reported, Whitworth's Reykjavik, about the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit, has Michael Douglas and Christoph Waltz rumored for the leads. He also has an Mi6 drama in the works with Colin Firth (but not the one he's doing with Michael Caine), and a still-under-wraps project about the Arab Spring. So don't bother watching CNN now, when you can just get this guy's boxed set in a few years and catch up over a weekend.