Idris Elba
Idris Elba
Idrissa Akuna "Idris" Elba, OBE is an English actor and musician. He is known for playing drug baron Russell "Stringer" Bell on the HBO series The Wire, Detective John Luther on the BBC One series Luther, and Nelson Mandela in the biographical film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. He has been nominated four times for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Miniseries or Television Film, winning one, and was nominated five times for a Primetime Emmy Award...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionTV Actor
Date of Birth6 September 1972
CityLondon, England
If you are going to call a film a 'black film' then you have to make a film that represents everyone that's black, which is almost impossible. That is why white films are not called white films, they are just called 'films.'
Whether it's music or acting, that creativity all comes from the same source.
Twenty or 30 years from now, I'm going to be on a beach in Jamaica.
I don't have a place that I call home at the moment because there's no point. I mean, I'm a traveling circus for a while. It's weird. Like, if I wanted to go home, there's nowhere to go. I just go to a hotel. But I've kind of gotten used to it.
Not obsessed with particularly Nike, but sneakers in general. I love them.
I did green screen for the first time! I wouldn't like to do a whole movie of green screen, though. You kind of forget the plot a little - like being in a Broadway play and doing it over and over and forgetting your line halfway through.
People expect me to be that guy. But I'm more east London boy than east Baltimore.
I was really ambitious, so I was innovative. I was one of the first DJs to do live calls, 'cause I found this phone device that would pick up other people's voices.
I have one of these bodies. When I was younger, I could never put weight on, and now that I'm a little older, there's a natural sort of chubbiness coming. But honestly, if I work out for a week, it drops off in no time.
Now there are certain things you have to prepare - like dialect and special skills. But in the moment, interaction between two characters on the page doesn't need - for me, I don't need to prepare that.
Television has shied away from being too dark, because so much has happened to us recently here in the West, and people are sort of wanting to see more uplifting sorts of things.
When I was a kid, I thought it was tough.
I've always had ambition, and the acting was successful and put my name on the map, but it was never the plan to stop there.
The long and short of it is that I am now in a position in England to green light movies, and that's really excellent - not high-budget movies, but movies none the less.