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Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome the very talented actor Don Cheadle to the program. His terrific film career includes roles in "Devil in a Blue Dress"--remember that? Mouse--stole the show. "Boogie Nights," "Traffic," and "Ocean's Eleven" and "Twelve." Saw that over the holiday season. I just gave you some money, Mr. Cheadle. This Sunday, he's up for a Golden Globe Award. His role in the remarkable new film "Hotel Rwanda" is what he's nominated for. The movie is now in theaters everywhere. Here, a scene now from "Hotel Rwanda."

Man: Many of you know influential people abroad. You must call these people. You must tell them what will happen to us. Say good-bye. But when you say good-bye, say it as though you are reaching through the phone and holding their hand. Let them know that if they let go of that hand, you will die.

Tavis: Don Cheadle, nice to meet you.

Don Cheadle: Good to see you, man.

Tavis: I have to start certain shows with disclaimers, um, because if I get up in it, at least people understand. I am a Don Cheadle fan.

Cheadle: Heh.

Tavis: So judge all my conversation with Don from the standpoint of my being a Don Cheadle fan, who I finally met for the first time. We have so many mutual fans.

Cheadle: I know.

Tavis: But have never met.

Cheadle: Yeah, it's a shame. Well, we'll do it again. First of many times.

Tavis: Nice to have you on the program.

Cheadle: Thank you.

Tavis: Let me start by saying congratulations. You are so phenomenal in this film. I did something with this film that I've never done before. I've been very fortunate, you know, when you host a show, the studios will often times arrange, as you know, for you to come into the studio to see the film if you're going to interview one of the stars. So, the studio made arrangements for me to actually see the film. So I saw the film courtesy of the studio. I was so moved by the film that I wanted to see it again, and I wanted to see how the audience would react to it, so I went over to Magic Johnson Theaters down the street from my house, down in the hood, and saw it again in a theater with people, and was just as moved the second time as I was when I saw it the first time. And even more so moved because I could feel and sense--which I love about going to movie theaters with black people. Sometimes they talk too much.

Cheadle: Yeah.

Tavis: But what I love about it is, they talk to the screen.

Cheadle: You can gauge it.

Tavis: You can gauge it. You can feel it, man. There was so much love. People were clapping and standing--it was just a regular movie showing. Wasn't a premiere, but these folks were into this film, and that's when I knew you had a hit on your hands.

Cheadle: Oh, thank you very much. That's great news.

Tavis: Did you enjoy doing it?

Cheadle: I had a great time. I mean, it was very difficult, obviously. It was very time-consuming and a lot of hard work, but any time it would get hard, you would think about what you were doing, and I would just feel sort lifted up and this sort of buoyant feeling, and just to go get back into it. I was really glad to be a part of it.

Tavis: Yeah. When you consider the--I get your point. But when you consider the storyline, kind of hard to feel sorry for yourself when you're doing a film like this.

Cheadle: Yeah, there was no complaining on the set. I mean, sure, there were logistical problems, as always, during, you know, shooting, shooting in Africa, and that's just sort of a budding industry in South Africa for the size of film that we brought down there. But we had great crews down there, we had great talent. All the other actors in the film are amazing, and we were just really fortunate, so we were really welcomed by the community down there.

Tavis: I've had the pleasure of interviewing Bill Clinton countless times in my career in radio and television. He's always been very nice to me. We've had a thousand conversations and gotten to be friendly over the years. I recall a conversation with him where I asked him once, post-his time in the White House, what his biggest regret was. You may recall when President Bush was asked what mistakes he'd made, in one of the debates--

Cheadle: Nothing.

Tavis: He had nothing. You remember this? He had nothing to say. I asked Clinton what the biggest mistake that he'd made, and his answer was very quick and very direct. He made a mistake on Rwanda. Uh, I raise that because, in the film--I don't want to give too much away--but in the film, there is a scene when your character Paul comes into the knowledge of what genocide really is and what was really happening the country of Rwanda. As an actor, when, for you, did you really start to get what you were playing, and what had really happened in Rwanda?

Cheadle: Well, um, I had some cursory knowledge of it, you know, seeing things in the newspaper, uh, just blurbs, you know, over the internet, but didn't really have a real understanding of what, you know, really the makeup of the genocide was, and who the genociders were, you know, so I, um...once I got the role, or actually, once that I knew I was being considered for the role, I started to do research for it, and Terry--the director Terry George--started sending me research. And, uh, that's when I really started getting into it and really studying it and reading books and looking at articles and photographs, and got in touch with Paul who lived in Belgium at the time--still lives in Belgium--and we just started, you know, sort of communicating back and forth, and that's when I started to really kind of getting deep into the research of it.

Tavis: Mm-hmm. And what, aside from just the--I can't--there's no--you can't find the right words when you try to marry something to genocide, um, but aside from the gruesome nature of what genocide really is, what most, for you, stuck out when you started to learn? What emotion, what piece of knowledge, what most stuck with you when you really started to get a sense of what had happened in Rwanda?

Cheadle: Well, for me, what I was struck most by was the sort of diabolical design that went into creating the circumstances that allowed the genocide to happen, that Rwanda had been colonized and given to the Belgians post-World War I, I believe--or to the Germans. And then the Belgians took over, and, uh, and they sort of pitted these two peoples against one another--the Hutu and the Tutsi--where there was not a division that existed before. There were some--they started arbitrarily picking people based on their features, based on what they thought were more Eurocentric sort of, uh ideologies, and pitted the minority Tutsi against the majority Hutu, and told the Tutsi that "You beat them or we beat you." So they were horrible overseers, and as soon as Belgium decided they were disinterested in Rwanda, they turned the power over to the Hutus, so, of course, the Hutus exacted reprisals on the Tutsis, and it just started this sort of cyclical, uh, problem that culminated in the genocide in 1994. So, I didn't know the makeup of it, and that was, to me, the most diabolical part of the whole thing.

Tavis: Share with me, if you can, the joy and the challenge of playing a character who is still alive and kicking. I was fascinated to see, at the end of the film, that the character you played, Paul, who was the hotel manager of the Hotel Rwanda, basically, uh, or the hotel featured in the film. So, Paul is the hotel manager. He's still alive, as you said earlier, lives with his family in Belgium, as we speak. Um, talk about the joy and the challenge of playing a real-life person, while that person is, obviously, still alive.

Cheadle: Well, I was--you know, obviously, there was a certain level of intimidation that I was gonna--

Tavis: Ha ha ha ha! This guy's gonna see this.

Cheadle: Yeah, he's gonna see it. He may actually get in front of a camera and go, "No."

Tavis: No, no, he wouldn't. Ha ha ha!

Cheadle: So, you know, there was a level of, sure, concern with that. But I just really thought the script did a great job of personalizing a story that could be too huge to get our minds around, you know, just the idea of a million people killed over 90, 100 days is more than we can fathom, but you can understand the love that a man has for his family and the love that he has for his friends and wanting to protect himself and the people that he loves. Um, so, talking to Paul, I was very quickly sort of put at ease because he's not some heroic, you know, 10-foot-tall man who's got a cape on. He is a man. And he's a very devoted family man. And I said, "Well, I can play that. You know, I'm a family man." And he was really committed to what was right and what was good. And he never looked at it as he was doing something extraordinary. He was just doing what was in front of him day to day to day. There was no planning. There was no plot beyond "Let me see if I can get through this one day." And I thought, "That's very playable. Day-to-day is very playable."

Tavis: Yeah. One of the things that makes me such a fan of yours is that you have this uncanny ability, this gift, this talent from God, to not just act the part as well as you do...and I suspect that acting--I've tried my hand, I've done a couple of cameos here and there--acting is a very difficult thing to do. What is even more difficult, I would think, is to act and to keep that accent up. We've all seen films where the actor slips in and out of the dialect.

Cheadle: Some of mine, I'm sure. You've seen me do it.

Tavis: No, I'm telling you. I was, like--whether it's "Ocean's Eleven" or "Twelve" and that accent, the British accent you have there, or this accent in "Hotel Rwanda"--where did you learn to do this dialect thing so well?

Cheadle: Well, you know, I would--the London accent--that's very difficult for me and very hard for me. And I, you know--

Tavis: You wouldn't know it by watching "Ocean's Eleven" or "Twelve."

Cheadle: But I really was resenting the other members in the cast because everyone was having a ball, and I'm sitting in the trailer trying to figure out diphthongs for, you know, certain vowels, and--"I--A--" You know? And everybody else was just having a ball. So that was kind of a drag. Um, but I think doing the, uh, the African dialect for this one was infinitely easier. One, I had a very close, you know, personal relationship with Paul and was able to just sort of sit up under him for a lot of it. And also, the music of that, you know, the language was just with me all the time, you know, being in Africa. I can't imagine, had we shot it somewhere else, having the same result. But all of us--not just me--Sophie Okonedo, who plays my wife in it, is brilliant in it. Uh, you know, she's from London, and she had to work her chops to get that down, and we had a lot of help, obviously, with the rest of the cast that were there, just sort of keeping their ears to us. And Leon Morenzi, who was my dialect coach out here, had a very big hand in that as well. But just having it in your ear a lot helped.

Tavis: Let me ask you a very impolitic question, but at least I was nice enough to tell you in advance.

Cheadle: I appreciate it.

Tavis: I was about to ask you an impolitic question. Um, do you feel cheated--and I say "cheated"--I mean to suggest or ask whether or not, for all the quality work you have done, um, does it bother you that you're just now coming into the consciousness of a lot of people who know that face but don't know the name Don Cheadle?

Cheadle: Not really.

Tavis: Yeah.

Cheadle: I mean, I feel, in a way, that I've had a real-- actually doing "Ocean's Eleven" and doing "Ocean's Twelve," and hanging out with three of probably the biggest stars...four or five of the biggest stars in the world and seeing what that is. You know, the birthday party that we were talking about before we came on--uh, Brad came to the party, and I was flipping through "People" Magazine and it said, you know, "Brad stopped by Don Cheadle's house in Santa Monica." I was, like, "Are they gonna say my address?"

Tavis: Ha ha ha ha!

Cheadle: How far is this gonna go? I called him up and I was, like, "Brad, you can't come to the crib anymore. That's over."

Tavis: Ha ha ha ha!

Cheadle: You've got a tail on you, man. And I was thinking, you know, I do too many "normal" things, you know? I go to the grocery store with my kids and shop, and we go buy, you know, school clothes at, you know, the mall, and I go play pickup games, and I would hate if that ever became something that was, you know, completely uncomfortable for my family or myself.

Tavis: Well, I got news for you, Don Cheadle.

Cheadle: It's about to?

Tavis: It's about to happen. You might not like this but it's about to happen because of the buzz on this film, and your performance in it. As you well know, Golden Globes are this Sunday. Congratulations on the Golden Globe nomination.

Cheadle: Thank you.

Tavis: A lot of Oscar buzz around this. How are you handling...not just that name being out there, not just Brad Pitt dropping by your crib, but this buzz? How you handling all this Oscar buzz?

Cheadle: I think--I mean, I can't really--A, I can't affect it one way or the other, so it's not really--it's outside of my sort of purview. So I just, you know--the work was done, uh, it's been done, um, and I was thinking of it today. It is sort of like a pickup game. I mean, it's nice when the captains go, "I pick you to be my team." You know, that's how I look at it. But at the same time, you've got to go play defense and try to play offense, and the work's gonna keep going regardless of what happens with this award season. So, I think it would be great. I think it's good for the film because I want people to come out and see the film, obviously, and I want people to know about Rwanda. But, you know, personally, I've got to keep moving.

Tavis: Yeah. The movie is "Hotel Rwanda." It stars one Don Cheadle, nominated this Sunday for a Golden Globe, and I hope--I certainly hope, in the coming days--an Oscar as well. Don, nice to see you man.

Cheadle: Good to see you, too.

Tavis: Pleasure to have you on. You deserve and earned everything you get, man.

Cheadle: Thank you.

Tavis: That's our show for tonight. Before I say good-bye, though, Don Cheadle's favorite website that he would like you to check out--amnesty.org. We try to give our guests on the program a chance to enlighten, encourage, and empower you by going to the web. Amnesty.org. I'll see you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from L.A., and keep the faith.