Forest Whitaker will be playing Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Roland Joffe’s upcoming film, The Archbishop And The Antichrist.

Whitaker has been strangely absent since winning an Oscar for his portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland (2006), but him playing an iconic figure like Tutu could cause a stir. The Archbishop And The Antichrist is based on a play by Michael Ashton, and revolves around the fictional story of a meeting between Tutu and a white South African mass murderer, Piet Blomfeld.

Joffe, whose best-known films – The Mission and The Killing Fields – were released the best part of 30 years ago, is currently bogged down in post-production on the $35 million feature, Singularity. The film, starring, Josh Hartnett and Neve Campbell, sees a comatose man go on a mental journey back to 18th-Century India, where he goes to war, falls in love, and get involved in all sorts of epic exploits. Can’t they just get this out the way so we can see Whitaker do Tutu?