Idris Elba taps own roots for Yardie

British actor Idris Elba said he tapped into his own roots growing up among London’s West Indian community — and his DJ experience — for his directorial debut, Yardie, shown last week at the Berlin film festival.

The gangster movie is set in Jamaica in the 1970s and the London neighbourhood of Hackney in 1980s, where Elba grew up as the only child of west African parents.

“I was raised in east London and the central character, his journey isn’t too dissimilar from most young black boys in England, whether they’re from the West Indies or Africa,” the star of TV’s Luther and The Wire and blockbusters such as Thor: Ragnarok told reporters.

“So when it came across my desk as a script — I had read the book as a kid — it was definitely something that I knew I could relate to.”

Yardie, slang for Jamaicans in general and Jamaican gangsters in particular, is based on a groundbreaking 1992 novel by Victor Headley about the black experience in Britain.

It tells the story of Jamaican boy D growing up in Kingston who saw his older brother, a DJ, shot dead when he was trying to make peace between rival gangs.

A decade later, in 1983, D is working for local drug lord King Fox, who has become a father figure. King Fox sends D (played by Aml Ameen of the Netflix series Sense8) to deliver a kilo of cocaine to a partner in London.

“Jamaicans, west Africans — we all live together so I was very close to that culture. England was an explosion of culture in the 80s — it just blew up,” he said.

“West Indians have been coming to England since the early 50s, 60s and then in the 70s and 80s, that fusion of London culture became rich and that’s when I was born.”

Elba, 45, said that he managed to largely avoid run-ins with the police and thugs in Hackney but that their influence was all around him. “Alongside good boys like me there were gangs, there were drug dealers and there were what you typically find in urban areas of any city of the world where there’s poor,” he said.

“When I relate to the story, it’s not because I was a gangster, I wasn’t.

“But when you’re in an immigrant in a [place] like London in the 80s, there were temptations left or right, just so that you can get ahead. Not everybody can get a job and just go off and make money.”

Yardie was screened in the Panorama sidebar section of the Berlin film festival, which ended late last week.