THE MAN AND MANDELA
Idris Elba, best known for playing a Baltimore hood and a tetchy English cop, may seem an odd choice to portray SA’s greatest statesman. But the mercurial actor has a gentler spirit than he cares to admit.
WALK into any press conference-in-waiting and you can tell immediately what sort of personage is expected. If the assembled reporters are chilled, slouching about and making idle chit-chat, then the anticipated celebrity is minor. A company director, an inventor of Post-Its, a retired ringmaster.
If, on the other hand, the press corps gleams and buzzes like the severed ends of stolen copper wire, someone more rarefied is about to arrive. The brighter the star, the hotter the room.
There was no idle slouching at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg last week. A gathered storm of journalists was all electrified jump and jitter, watching the door with one eye, checking recording equipment and cameras with the other.
A broadcast newswoman, fresh from covering scenes of murder and mayhem, was aflutter with excitement. “If I wait until he sits down before I place my microphone,” she said, “do you think it would be okay to stroke his arm?”
The cause of all this palpitation was British actor Idris Elba, in South Africa for the premiere of Anant Singh’s production of
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. You’d think Elba would be all too familiar with the palpitations he causes, but he slunk in like a big, bashful cat (a lovestruck blogger posted the suggestion: “He should play a Black Panther!”) and immersed all 1.9m of himself in a chair, trying to look unremarkable. “As if!” the lovestruck blogger might have said.
Question time was short and focused. Elba was here to talk about the film and his role as Nelson Mandela. He was not here to talk about his early life. Born Idrissa Akuna Elba on September 6 1972 and raised in what travel guides call a “rougher part” of east London, he was an only child who discovered drama in high school. He won a place at Britain’s National Youth Music Theatre, but the grant money ran out, so he worked night shifts in a Ford factory to earn a living. At 20, he threw away his welding mask and flew to New York to seek his fortune in film. He doesn’t talk
‘Do you think it would be okay to stroke his arm?’
about what his mom, a Ghanaian clerical worker, and dad, a factory boss from Sierra Leone, thought of this move. But then Idris Elba doesn’t talk about much, except his work.
He has a daughter, who lives with his ex-wife in the US, but he doesn’t talk much about her either. Whether this reticence is a deliberate attempt to remain private, or simply because, until now, he has been an actor of rare talent who remains just outside the spotlight, is hard to say. Judging by his air of slight discomfort — part of his charm both on screen and off — it might be the former, but last month he broke with form and granted a frank interview to American GQ staff writer Zach Baron.
In the magazine’s October cover story, Elba spoke about how strange it felt to be sudden fodder for hungry tabloids. They scented blood after he got into a near-fight with former Oasis singer Liam Gallagher (as anyone might). It happened after this year’s NME Awards in the UK. It involved someone’s hair being affectionately ruffled, followed by someone else’s cap being angrily torn off and flung. Elba put it to Baron like this: “Don’t touch his hair, apparently. F*** off. Next time walk with a f***ing hairdresser, then.”
Of his childhood, Elba told Baron: “I sort of blended into the background quite a bit. I wasn’t the guy that was a big personality. I was the tall, silent type.” He still claims this anonymity. “In London Soho in a cap, I’m just a f***ing tall black man walking along.”
But not today, and not in this gathering. Today he is The Man. We didn’t talk about it, though. Nor did we get a chance to talk about his musical alter ego, DJ Big Driis the Londoner, whose main media are hip-hop and soul. As a teenager, Elba helped his uncle provide music for London weddings. He started his own DJ business with schoolmates in 1987
‘Young Madiba was quite the opposite of the saint he grew into or that we say he is’
and has been rapping, recording and spinning ever since. He was supposed to play a set in Soweto the day before Mandela: Long
Walk to Freedom had its first SA screening, but was pulled off a plane and sent to hospital in the UK for treatment after an asthma attack. All he would say about this is: “I’m exhausted. I’ve had 48 hours that have been a complete eye-opener for me.”
Elba insisted on catching the next flight to SA as soon as he was discharged from hospital, because he wanted to see the film with people to whom it matters most — those whose lives it depicts.
“When you are playing someone like Mandela, who is a world icon, you have to pay attention,” he said, sitting up straighter in his chair and pointing intense eyebrows at the rows of reporters. “You have to look at the many different points of view from which this film and this person will be seen. We were showing a Madiba that not many people know — his younger life, which is quite the opposite of being the saint that he grew into or that we say he is. We wanted to make sure that not only was the film truthful, but also respectful, so we did have the responsibility of taking on board all these different opinions, all these different points of view, but then we courageously had to go away and make the film we wanted to make.”
Having played a living saint, does he now consult the book of Madiba morals in his everyday life? “One has to carry his spirit in some form,” he replied. “People ask me what I have taken with me from playing him, if part of him stays with me, and the one word that keeps coming back to me is ‘patience’. Patience is something he grasped very well. Also he could stand outside himself and look at a problem, which made him very gracious. So these are two things that I try my best to do now. I’m very grumpy and very ungracious and very impatient, but I’d like very much to take those traits of his with me into my life.”
Grumpy, ungracious and impatient. Sounds like the fictional
Detective Chief Inspector John Luther. Since wrapping Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Elba has, among other things (like averting an apocalypse in Pacific Rim), filmed a third season of Luther, which starts in SA (on DStv channel 120) on December 29.
Asked by a BBC interviewer how he’d achieved Luther’s distinctive shambling walk, Elba replied: “It’s a great compliment … but honestly, over the past three years I’ve been dealing with a really bad injury on my ankle … I end up having to choose my shoes that I use for Luther very carefully because in season one it was the same pair of shoes that just were too tight and hurt me when I walked a certain way. I’ve heard that Luther has a crazy walk, but it’s really not as intentional as I’d like to say.”
It’s difficult to see oneself from the outside, so when Elba claims to have neither grace nor patience, perhaps he is not being disingenuous. Take another example of grace. On the same platform at the press conference were producer Anant Singh, director Justin Chadwick and co-star Tony Kgoroge, whose portrayal of a young Walter Sisulu is infused with both gravitas and style. The journalists drooling over Elba barely noticed these luminaries. Most actors, enjoying the attention, wouldn’t be bothered by this oversight. Elba was. Most actors are only too eager to take all the glory for themselves. Not this one.
With a wall of eyes fixed on him and a microphone constantly thrust at him, Elba tried repeatedly to turn both in another direction. “Let Justin take that one,” he said, when asked how struggle veterans felt about the film.
Chadwick, all shiny eyes and sharp cheekbones (give him a bow and arrow and he could pass for Orlando Bloom as Legolas), responded: “I was very nervous. This is the most important audience. To have those men and women in the room was a surreal experience. To see their stories up on the screen — intimate stories, like the two little girls in the house on their own, which was something [Mandela’s daughter] Zindzi had told me about — and to have them there reacting to that was overwhelming. I hadn’t quite expected that level of emotion. Winnie’s reaction was very emotional. George Bizos held me. And [Ahmed] Kathrada. They felt we had caught the spirit of their struggle, which was incredible. Obviously, we couldn’t catch the whole thing — Eddie Daniels, who had taken me and my family to Robben Island, doesn’t feature in the film, but he thanked me. Everybody seemed to realise that we can’t tell the whole thing, that this is a point of view about the cost to a man and the cost to his family, and I’m just relieved that they embraced the film and felt it was truthful.”
Elba may balk at taking any credit, but others do it for him. Singh said: “When I saw him on screen, I knew he had the job, but when he arrived here and we started — we filmed the end of the movie at the beginning — on the first day we knew: this is him. He is a great actor. It doesn’t matter which role he’s playing.”
Which brings us to patience. Elba struck a global vein of attention with his performance as Stringer Bell, the quiet, immaculate gangster who studied economics between ordering assassinations, in David Simon’s cop series The Wire. According to those who know, his garbled Baltimore accent was immaculate too. (In real life, he has a softened Cockney baritone.)
The Wire was a sleeper hit and the attention only came a few years after the series was finished, by which time Elba had left the character behind and moved on. It taught him that the life of an actor is a patient one.
When a journalist pointed out that playing Mandela must be the role of a lifetime, Elba agreed, with reservations.
“It isn’t until you do a role like this that people care about your career,” he said, “but it is in essence the very small roles at the beginning of your career that get you where you are. I’m very thankful for this role, but my earlier roles in my early years are the reason I’m here.
“Justin and Anant had seen an old film of mine called Sometimes in April [a TV drama about the Rwandan genocide in which Elba played an army captain], which I did maybe seven years ago, just after I’d finished The Wire. I wouldn’t have got Sometimes in April if I hadn’t done The Wire, and I wouldn’t have got The Wire if I hadn’t done one episode of Law & Order in New York City. So it’s very nice to have a moment like this, very much so, and this is very much a career-defining moment for me, but my whole journey has been every job I’ve got. I’ve appreciated every job, and every job has taken me to the next stage.”
The next stage, after Mandela, is something completely different. “Playing Mr Mandela has been a complete gift,” Elba said, “but the next role I’m going to take on is the complete opposite — a commander who gathers child soldiers. It’s a very tough and harrowing script and, as you can imagine, I will not be winning any awards for Mr Nice Guy in that role, but it’s also a pinnacle in my career, even though the character is so despicable. It’s a massive challenge and that’s what we do in making films: challenge ourselves and challenge the audience.”
One challenge Elba will not be taking on, despite persistent rumours, is 007. “No,” he said, amused but steely. “I am not the new Bond.” Pity. He’d be brilliant.
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is in cinemas on November 28.