LOS ANGELES -- Morgan Freeman is a playful man with a healthy ego, as one might have after having played God in two movies.

"Good morning everyone. Don't get up," he says with a grin as he enters a press conference room to promote Invictus, the tale of how a fractured post-apartheid South Africa united behind its World Cup-winning rugby team.

He is immediately congratulated for good news from the previous day.

"National Board of Review!" he says, segueing into a Fat Albert-esque "Hey, hey, hey!"

The New York-based organization of film experts became the first whistlestop on this year's road-to-the-Oscars with two awards for Invictus -- Clint Eastwood as best director and, for his portrayal of Nelson Mandela, Morgan Freeman sharing best actor honours (with Up In the Air's George Clooney) .

For Freeman, it's the culmination of 14 years of literally holding Nelson Mandela's hand.

"This started with Madiba (Mandela's South African nickname) naming me as his heir apparent, so to speak," Freeman says. "He was asked at the publication of his book Long Walk to Freedom, 'Mr. Mandela, if your book becomes a movie, who would you like to play you?' And he said 'Morgan Freeman.'

"So from then on, it was like 'Okay, Morgan Freeman is going to be Mandela somewhere down the line.' "

For years, that project was presumed to be a movie of Long Walk to Freedom.

"But we tried to make it into a script and it couldn't happen."

In the meantime, Freeman remained attached to Mandela.

"I said to him, 'If I'm going to play you, I'm going to have to have access. I'm going to be close enough to hold your hand.'

"And over the years, that is what I did. If he was in any proximity, I would know about it and I would go to him and have lunch, dinner, sit with him while he's waiting to go onstage or whatever. And during that time, I would sit and hold Madiba's hand.

"That's not camaraderie. I find if I hold your hand, I get your energy. And I have a sense of how you feel. That's important to me in trying to become another person."

That person, Nelson Mandela, will likely be remembered as one of the most influential leaders of the 20th century. And Invictus (the title evokes the William Ernest Henley poem with the famous words, "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul") is the tale of a great political masterstroke.

Elected South Africa's first black president, after spending much of his life in prison under the apartheid regime, Mandela faced an angry white electorate, fearful of retribution, and a black electorate that might have obliged.

A possible tipping point was a vote by the African National Congress to disband the Springboks, the national rugby team whose green and gold jersey was the equivalent of the Confederate flag to many blacks.

Instead, Mandela decided to use South Africa's hosting of the 1995 World Cup of Rugby as a rallying point for the entire country.

He became hands-on with the team and befriended captain Francois Pienaar (played by Matt Damon), encouraging them to visit and practise in the black townships (the Springboks even made a celebrated visit to the tiny prison cell Mandela lived in for 17 years).

The improbable underdog World Cup story arguably had as much to do with stabilizing South Africa as anything else in Mandela's term of office.

The dream season and its political overtones was retold in the John Carlin book Playing the Enemy. It represented but a tiny slice of Mandela's life and career, but it was enough for Freeman.

Having all but given up getting his chance to play Mandela, "in '06, we got this book proposal from John Carlin. We bought it and got a script written. And thus was there a role to play, to give the world an insight into who Mandela is and how he operates. It was perfect."

Having already done his homework, Freeman says "the biggest challenge was to sound like him. Everything else was kind of easy to do, to walk like him. He has a few tics and things I picked up."

All that was left was play -- which is how Freeman always describes what he does for a living.

"It might have become more than that were I working with someone other than Clint Eastwood. He is so out of your way as an actor. He likes to watch actors play and I don't think I'd like anything other than that.

"Work is something else. Work is what YOU do."

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