n “Invictus,” Morgan Freeman got the role he was destined to play: Nelson Mandela.

And that’s because the man who mattered most, Mandela, (called “Madiba” after his Xhosa clan’s title) thought so.

“This started out with Madiba naming me his heir apparent so to speak,” Freeman said Friday in Los Angeles.

That happened when South Africa’s first black president had a press conference in the 1990s for his just-published autobiography, “The Long Road to Freedom.”

“Mr. Mandela,” Freeman recounted the media asking, “if your book becomes a movie, who would you like to play you? He said Morgan Freeman.”

“Since then, we’ve read every script ever written that had Mandela in it for even a page,” said Lori McCreary, Freeman’s producing partner.

“We worked on his autobiography for seven years with a South African producer and it was so dense. You can’t tell Mandela’s life in two hours.”

In 2006 they saw “a book proposal from John Carlin” that told how Mandela, early in his presidency with a polarized nation, cannily used the South African rugby team and its efforts to win the World Cup to unite the nation.

“It was perfect. This was the role to play to give the world an insight into who Mandela is,” McCreary said.

There was only one hurdle. “We needed to go to Madiba and ask his blessing for not doing his autobiography; Morgan had looked him in the eye and said, ‘Yes. I’ll do this.’ ”

They went to South Africa for lunch with the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

“Morgan said, ‘We read this book about this incredible event’ - and he didn’t get the sentence out and Madiba said, ‘Ah, the World Cup.’ ”

How did Freeman confront this date with cinematic destiny?

“When he said I would be the one to play him, I had to start preparing then. I met him and said, ‘If I’m going to play you, I’m going to have access to you, to be close enough to hold your hand.’

“The biggest challenge was to sound like him. Everything else was easy.”

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