Idris Elba Goes Brutal, With Grace
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Neil Cross, creator of the hit BBC show “Luther,” starring Idris Elba, says a discomfiting thing happens whenever he socializes with his leading man.
“Being a middle- aged man in a room with Idris Elba,” Mr. Cross said, “is the closest thing you can imagine to being invisible.”
The same thing happens, he added, when Mr. Elba is on screen. Whether playing Luther, which won him a Golden Globe, or Stringer Bell, his breakout role in the old HBO series “The Wire,” Mr. Elba tends to pull all eyes his way. It even happened during a playful promo Mr. Elba recently shot with his “Star Trek Beyond” co-star Chris Pine.
“Chris Pine is an attractive guy,” one commenter wrote, “But he looks like a block of uncooked tofu next to Idris Elba.”
Mr. Elba, a 43-year- old Londoner, has played roles that are wildly varied. He’s been a superhero, a variety of villains, a stalker, a stalkee; he’s played Nelson Mandela; and he has appeared in a Tyler Perry movie as well as a musical dramedy.
In an otherwise damning review of “This Christmas” — the musical dramedy — one critic singled out Mr. Elba, likening his “sulky, sexy energy” to that of Marlon Brando. His admirers, who long for him to become the first black James Bond, are similarly ardent, recently rushing en masse to his defense when the author of a new Bond novel dismissed Mr. Elba as “too street” for the role. Indeed, the insult, for which the author later apologized, only intensified the clamor.
Now, Mr. Elba’s name is entering Oscar chatter, again — the same happened with “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” (2013)— with a starring role as a warlord in “Beasts of No Nation.” Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, who won an Emmy for directing the first season of HBO’s “True Detective,” the film is being primed as awards bait.
Netflix, the film’s distributor, opened it theatrically in the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan on October 16 and began streaming it the same day, making “Beasts” a high-profile experiment, and a few theater chains have boycotted the film in response.
By Mr. Elba’s reckoning, this is his darkest role yet. He plays Commandant, a brutal yet mesmerizing Pied Piper who stalks the wilds of an unnamed West African nation, molding youngsters into child soldiers who torture, rape and kill. Mr. Elba, cognizant of his fans, initially balked when Mr. Fukunaga approached him.
“I’m like: ‘Dude, they’re not going to like me after seeing this,” Mr. Elba said. He added: “Not that that’s why I make films. The first thing is, this is a tough role. You have to be as authentic as you can in a role like that, otherwise it’s pointless and becomes a puppet show of a dictator. The challenge was, ‘Let’s humanize it.’ Someone gave birth to this man.”
In the end, Mr. Elba said the very thing that worried him about the role was what convinced him he had to do it. “I wanted to find a way to make him real,” he said.
Mr. Fukunaga said he homed in on Mr. Elba because he wanted Commandant to be at once a father figure and a charismatic leader who easily seduced. “I thought he did a tremendous job, holding that line between being thoroughly despicable and thoroughly likable,” he said.
The production was grueling: It involved seven weeks in the jungles of Ghana with no amenities. It was also, for Mr. Elba, an ancestral home- coming. He had never before been to Ghana, his mother’s birthplace, and he got to meet some of her sisters and members of their tribe, the Ga. “An incredible time,” he said. Mr. Elba’s parents met in Sierra Leone and moved to London, where Mr. Elba was born and raised.
Mr. Elba cultivated many interests growing up: He was a D. J. (and still is), and he played cricket, hockey, soccer, basketball, rugby and ran track. He kickboxed and breakdanced.
He discovered acting before leaving school at 16. A few years after that, he began going hard for television roles, even the ones that called for white actors.
He said he made a decision about fear early in his life. He was on the playground when a bully stole his ball, then fired it at him. The other kids laughed. Young Idris grabbed the bully by the shoulders, and spun him around and around before letting him go, sending him sailing. “It was a pretty monumental moment for me,” he said. “I wasn’t going to be scared of nothing or nobody.”
Right now, Mr. Elba believes he is at a career pinnacle. As such, he feels a responsibility to keep moving in a dizzying number of directions. Since the start of the year, he’s appeared in a documentary, filmed more of “Luther,” begun shooting other features and recorded a new album, all the while raising an infant son with his partner, Naiyana Garth. (He has a teenage daughter from a previous relationship.) He’s also broken a British land-speed driving record, and is starting a new clothing line with Superdry.
All of which could suggest that MI6 affiliation notwithstanding, he already is a real life 007.