Forest Steven Whitaker III (born July 15, 1961) is an actor, producer and director of film and television. He played Dr. Stephen Arden in the 1996 movie Species.
Career[]
Whitaker played Saw Gerrera in the stand-alone Star Wars film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. He later returned to voice the character in the Star Wars Rebels episodes "Ghosts of Geonosis" and "In the Name of the Rebellion." He reprised the role once more in the 2019 video game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. In 2022, he returned to live-action in Andor.
After making his film debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Whitaker went on to earn a reputation for intensive character study work for films, such as Platoon (1986), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Bird (1988), The Crying Game (1992), Phenomenon (1996), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), The Great Debaters (2007), The Butler (2013), Arrival (2016), and Respect (2021). He has also appeared in Panic Room (2002), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story]] (2016) as Saw Gerrera, and Black Panther (2018) as Zuri. In 1995, he gave a "characteristically emotional performance" in Wayne Wang and Paul Auster's Smoke. In 1996, he played the role of a good-natured man in Phenomenon, alongside John Travolta and Robert Duvall, which earned him a Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favorite Supporting Actor – Drama, and was also nominated for NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture.