Kevin Perry

BEFORE he was the eponymous tortured detective in Luther, before he was a regal Nelson Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom, before he was even The Wealth of Nations-toting drug kingpin Stringer Bell in The Wire, Idris Elba was a schoolboy on a bus in east London being pelted with eggs by racists.

“My school, Trinity, was just off the Barking Road, which would take all the National Front supporters to the football at West Ham,” he remembers, leaning forward on a sofa in a production office, in London’s Holborn, that smells of expensive candles and industriousness.

“They’d come past our school, and if we got on that bus on a game day… mate, if you were Indian or black you were getting it. Eggs thrown at you, the whole thing,” he says.

Even in his youth, Elba was not easily intimidated, but this was something new. Before his family moved to Canning Town, they had lived on the Holly Street Estate in the more ethnically amorphous borough of Hackney, where he was born in 1972. His mother, Eve, is Ghanaian and his father, Winston, was a Sierra Leonean who worked at Ford’s in Dagenham.

“It was probably one of the most diverse workplaces you could have,” recalls Elba. “I’d been shielded from racial tension, but when we moved I felt it full whack. It was a National Front area and there were no black people. I remember walking down the street and being called a ‘black ----’. No one talked like that in Hackney.”

Elba found himself thinking back to these moments while working on Guerrilla, a new television series that deals with the rise of the black power movement in Britain in the early Seventies.

Created by John Ridley, who won an Oscar in 2014 for his screenplay for 12 Years A Slave, it follows the lives of two radical activists, played by Freida Pinto and Babou Ceesay, who become members of the British equivalent of America’s Black Panthers.

Elba, who is one of the show’s producers, plays a non-violent community leader and Pinto’s former lover.

While the characters are fictional, the story is rooted in some often-ignored historical truths such as the existence of Special Branch’s “black power desk”.

“Discovering that the police had a dedicated team to fight black activism is bonkers,” says Elba. “That’s the very same Scotland Yard that we respect now.”

Off screen, Elba has his own radical streak. Last week, while compering a fundraising gig for the homeless charity Shelter, he launched into an impassioned attack on the government’s decision to abolish housing benefit for out-of-work 18-21 yearolds. It is an issue close to his heart. During the late 1990s, after he had taken himself to New York to broaden his acting opportunities, Elba found himself living out of a van.

“I didn’t make that speech as an actor,” he says. “I made it as someone who found themselves homeless at 26. Okay, you might say, ‘It’s New York. You wanted to go and act and you ran out of money. Do you expect a hand-out from New Yorkers? No.’ But when it’s happening in my own country, the fight against homelessness really resonates with me.”

Elba had left Britain in search of meatier roles than the tiny parts that were available in such shows as Absolutely Fabulous and The Bill.

However, he feels the odds of getting his career started in the Britain of 2017 would be better.

“These days, you can get booked in England for a massive Netflix show just as easily as an ITV show,” he says. “That’s very different. Back in the early ’90s, I had to go over there and practically pretend to be American to get a job.”

The job he eventually got was in David Simon’s multifaceted The Wire, the show that did for the Baltimore drug trade what Charles Dickens did for the Victorian workhouse.

To say that Stringer Bell was a step up from the parts Elba was being offered at home is a little like saying a night at the Ritz is preferable to passing out under a bridge.

Elba says he had little clue what The Wire, would