Who's that imposter?

Morgan Freeman has been cast as God — twice — so he evidently has no trouble projecting moral authority. The challenge of portraying Nelson Mandela, then, was not the size of the halo, but knowing the performance would be measured against the real, familiar Mandela, and his myth. “If we can say any part of acting is hard, then playing someone who is living and everybody knows would be the hardest,” Freeman said in a phone interview.

The role has defeated actors as varied as Danny Glover (the 1987 TV film Mandela), Sidney Poitier (Mandela and de Klerk, 1997) and Dennis Haysbert (Goodbye Bafana, 2007), in vehicles that were reverential and mostly forgettable. But as someone who studied Mandela over the course of three years while he replaced an apartheid regime with a genuine democracy, I found Freeman’s performance in the film Invictus, directed by Clint Eastwood, uncanny — less an impersonation than an incarnation.

He gets the rumble and halting rhythm of Mandela’s speech, the erect posture and stiff gait. There is a striking physical resemblance, enhanced by the fact that Freeman, 72, is just a few years younger than Mandela was in the period the film covers. More important, Freeman conveys the manipulative charm, the serene confidence, the force of purpose, the hint of mischief and the lonely regret that made Mandela one of the most fascinating political figures of his time.

The story of Invictus, drawn from John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation, begins with the newly inaugurated president of post-apartheid South Africa looking for ways to enlist his fearful white minority — with its talent, wealth, resentment and capacity for insurrection — in the business of governing a democracy. His inspired stratagem is to embrace the Springboks national rugby team, the darlings of the formerly ruling Afrikaners and, for most non-white South Africans, a symbol of brutal and humiliating repression.

The new president sets the team’s captain (François Pienaar, played by Matt Damon) the improbable goal of winning the World Cup; the tournament is to be held in South Africa in a year, and the Springboks are given little chance. Mandela sets himself the considerably more improbable goal of uniting country behind the team. So loathed were the Springboks that those few blacks who showed up for matches rooted loudly for the other side. So the rugby campaign was one of Mandela’s boldest strokes of statecraft, no less impressive for the fact that the euphoria he achieved could barely begin to extinguish three centuries of racial antagonism.

According to Freeman, his mission to portray Mandela on the screen began with a public invitation from the subject himself. At a press conference to promote the publication of his 1994 memoir, Long Walk to Freedom, someone asked Mandela who should play him in the movie. “And he said he wanted me,” Freeman recalled. “So it became. That was the whole sanction, right there.”

The South African film producer Anant Singh, who bought the movie rights to Long Walk, arranged for Mandela and Freeman to meet. “I told him that if I was going to play him, I was going to have to have access to him,” the actor said. “That I would have to hold his hand and watch him up close and personal.” Their encounters ranged from tea at Mandela’s home in Johannesburg to a charity fund-raiser in Monaco. But through multiple screenplays Mandela’s sprawling memoir proved too unwieldy for a film, and Freeman abandoned the project. “There’s just too much to whittle down to movie size,” Freeman said.

Then, in 2006, Carlin, a British journalist who had covered Mandela in the 1990s, was in Mississippi to write an article on poverty in the American South for El Pais, the Spanish daily that now employs him. He ended up in the Clarksdale living room of Freeman’s business partner. When the host went to the kitchen for a bottle of wine, Carlin recalls, he turned to Freeman.

 “This is your lucky day,” he said. “I have a movie for you.”
“Oh, really,” Mr. Freeman replied. “What’s it about?”
“It’s based on a book I am writing about an event that distills the essence of Mandela’s genius, and the essence of the South African miracle.”
“Oh,” Freeman replied, “you mean the rugby game?” Carlin’s proposal for his book had already been circulating in Hollywood, and it had caught Freeman’s eye.

Freeman sought Mandela’s blessing, bought the rights and persuaded Eastwood to direct. They hired Peckham, a South African émigré, to write the script. Freeman insists that if the portrayal transcends impersonation, that is largely Peckham’s doing. As an actor, “you’re looking for the physical: how he stands, how he walks, how he talks,” he said. “Nuances he has in terms of tics or movements. Things that sort of define him. The inner life has to come off the page. Whatever he’s thinking, I don’t know. You have a script, and you stick to that script, and the script is going to inform you of everything.”
While Freeman brought to the project a decade of firsthand observation, Peckham, who left South Africa in 1981, had never — and still has not — met Mandela. “He was a nonperson for my entire growing up,” Peckham said in a phone interview from his home in California. “You weren’t even supposed to have pictures of him. Everything I learned about him I learned from a distance, after I came here.”

For the feel of Mandela’s everyday speech, the screenwriter mined written documents, especially transcripts of a 1998 court case in which the South African president was subjected to a hostile grilling by lawyers for the national rugby hierarchy. Peckham’s main difficulty in writing a script, he found, was to do justice to such a familiar and beloved figure without tipping into idolatry.

The notion they settled on to humanise the hero was that while Mandela was making a nation he was neglecting his own family. It is certainly true that Mandela’s marriage to the cause contributed to his two divorces and his estrangement from some of his children. In the movie there is a scene of Mandela, who could always summon the words to move a crowd, failing to connect with his resentful grown daughter Zinzi.

Though an admirer of Freeman, Carlin has seen Mandela gotten wrong often enough that he braced himself for disappointment. After attending a screening in Paris last month, he sent an ecstatic e-mail message: “They didn’t screw it up!” he wrote. “WHAT a relief!” For me the realisation that Freeman had nailed it came as the film ended. Alongside the closing credits came still photos of the actual rugby match, and the actual Mandela. And for a second I wondered, “Who is that impostor?”