An interview with Idris Elba for RockNRolla (2009)

* A version of this interview first appeared in the now-defunct Arena magazine in 2009...

After 37 episodes of The Wire, Russell 'Stringer' Bell, the educated, money-laundering drug dealer who rose from the west Baltimore projects to become second-in-command of the city's biggest crime syndicate, was blown away by a gay gangster with a shotgun. He was 35 when the crime occurred in 2004, and at 35 Stringer was just three years older than the man playing him. But like Stringer Bell, that actor wasn't quite all he appeared to be to outsiders. In fact, when Idris Elba was introduced to the press, they had quite a surprise in store: instead of the tough-ass gangster dude, they'd meet the mild-mannered chap who created him, a funny, self-deprecating Londoner from the borough of Hackney with a preference for reggae and R&B over Class-A narcotics.

“I'd fuck with them,” grins Elba, now based in the States. “Because I'd be terribly polite. I'd turn up to interviews and go, 'Er, hello...' – he does a passable impression of a black Hugh Grant – “And they'd be horrified.” He guffaws, slipping effortlessly into slang. “They couldn't believe it. They'd be like, 'Nah, dog, what the fuck, man, you buggin'? Why you talkin' like that – you preparin' for another role?' They were like, 'Who the fuck is this guy? He's not even from here!'”

Now, though, the guy from over there is back where he started, in a manner of speaking. Put forward for the role by super-producer Joel Silver, who cast him in the little-seen horror thriller The Reaping, Elba will next be seen walking the streets of London, playing another gangster – this one a little less hardcore – in Guy Ritchie's latest gangster romp RockNRolla, playing Mumbles, sidekick to the slick but not so quick One-Two, as played by Gerard Butler, in a tale of stolen paintings, dodgy investments and ruthless Russian oligarchs. “Mumbles is an 80s baby,” says Elba. “He's a guy that's decided not to go the nine-to-five route and he's figured a way to make money semi-illegally. Or very illegally – either way. He and One-Two are like the ringleaders of this little motley crew, and they get shit done. They need to make an earner here and there.”

After the unfathomable Revolver, RockNRolla marks a welcome return from the Lock, Stock director to the seedy, picaresque capital underworld that he paints so vividly, and with an almost old-fashioned sense of the eccentric. “It's got a lot of energy,” confirms Elba. “There are moments in it that are classic Guy Ritchie moments, lots of comedy slapstick and lots of interesting violence. I think working with Guy is like working with the Mafia. Everyone knows him, and his people are Guy Ritchie die-hard crew members. You kinda get signed in. Well, you kind of get sworn in . If Guy says you're all right, you're all right! He's a very nice guy though, man. Very personable. Gives you a hug in the morning. Loves to sit down and have a chat. He asks, 'What are you reading right now, Idris? What are you listening to, Idris?' Really interested. I like him a lot.”

That interest meant a lot to Elba. He's a thoughtful, witty guy, with a dry sense of humour, born in Hackney in 1972 to a Ghanaian mother and father from Sierra Leone. He discovered acting during his school days, and though one gets the impression he could do anything he turns his hand to – he's recently launched a management company and has a neat sideline in music that we'll come to later – Elba chose the stage very early on in his career. So what was the lure? Was it the greasepaint? Was it the crowd? Was it an early infatuation with Al Pacino? In fact, it was none of these things. “I fancied my drama teacher,” he says bluntly. “It's well documented, I've said it a few times, and I'm trying to be consistent. She was... er... a very large-breasted woman, and that was my main draw. But that said, she was very nurturing. She'd say, 'You're very good at what you do.'”

Her name was Ms McPhee, and she helped Elba write little scenarios that would cause her to ask, possibly jokingly but perhaps not, “What's going on in your life, Idris?! Is there some trauma we should know about???” Elba laughs about it now. “They were just highly dramatic situations where we, the actors, got to either scream and shout or pretend to fight,” he recalls. “I went to a boys' school, so fight scenes always went down well. There were a lot of father figures coming home, screaming at the the son, and the son screaming, 'FUCK YOU!!!' There were never any mum and dad scenes, because of course it was a boys' school, so no one ever wanted to play mum. But that was what led me into wanting to do drama; my roots lie in theatre.”

After a stint in a regional tour of Of Mice And Men, which may be the only time John Steinbeck's Lenny was ever played with dreadlocks, Elba soon settled into the first stages of career that moved pretty fluidly. You might think that a 6ft 2in Black Briton might soon encounter prejudice and stereotyping, but his earliest TV roles were in comedies, such as 2Point4 Children and, incredibly, Absolutely Fabulous. “I learned pretty early in my game that I was good at auditions. I'd walk in the room and my accent would change, but it would change depending on who I was talking to. So if I walked in and there was some posh, beautiful casting director, my accent would change somewhat.” He adopts a soft, distinguished but not too smarmy purr. “'Hiii therrrree...' But if I walked in and there was some fat sweaty dude from East London, my accent would change accordingly. And one day I realised that I was bagging these jobs not because of my acting but because I was really good at auditioning. I could react very quickly to what was going on in the room.”

At the same time, Elba was working on a whole other career that, had it got going, might not have seen him make the fateful move to America. “I really wanted to be a radio DJ for a long time. I wanted to be on the radio. And while I was doing all this acting, I kept a steady rotation on the DJ circuit. I was on pirate radio quite a bit, with my partner, Quincy D. He's actually a comedian in England. He's very funny, in fact, he's going to the Edinburgh Festival now. But he and I were The Goodfellas, and I loved it. It was my bread and butter money when I wasn't acting.”

Elba had a regular slot at Fresh And Funky at the Hanover Grand, as one of the rotation DJs in the downstairs room. If you ever went, you may recall his DJ name. “It started off as Mr Kipling,” he chuckles. “I kid you not! I was kind of friendly with the ladies, and my friend Boogie – who's one of my oldest friends, I've know him since I was ten years old – says to me, 'Fuckin' 'ell, Idris, you got more tarts than Mr Kipling!' So the name stuck. Mr Kipling was my name. DJ Kippers. But I've moved on since then. I've been through various DJ names. Right now I'm using the, er, monicker Dris: King Dris. I was Big Dris for a while, but I'm too old for Big Dris. King's a bit more fitting with the grey hairs and beard, know what I mean?”

Elba didn't know it, but he was now a double threat. “Some chick said to me, 'You're a DJ and an actor??? Oh fucking hell! Have you never heard the saying, 'Never date a DJ or an actor?' An then she walked off. With the drink that I'd bought her...” Nevertheless, he was about to have the last laugh. An Egyptian director, filming in Paris, had seen Elba in AbFab and contacted his agent in Richmond. “He sees this episode of Absolutely Fabulous, and he says, 'Zat's se guy I want!' So he tracks me down, my agent gives me a call, and she says, 'Can you speak French?' I was like, 'No.' And she said, 'Well, you've just been offered a part playing Catherine Deneuve's boyfriend.'”

The film was Belle Maman (1999) and was shot in Paris and Martinique, where Deneuve would summon Elba to her trailer – more of a beach hut – and go through his lines in phonetic French.

“I don't wanna kiss and tell,” he recalls, “but... Yeah, mate! I'd be sitting on the beach, the sand in my feet, the sea rolling back and Catherine Deneuve speaking French to me. I remember thinking, 'This can't be real!' I guess that's when I realised that life on EastEnders was not gonna be for me. No thanks, I don't wanna do The Bill. I just want to do scenes on the beach with Catherine Deneuve. I wanna do films.' So I ended up moving to America.”

The move to the US, which took some five years in all, was not an immediate success. “It cost a fucking arm and leg,” he sighs, “then I got here... and I didn't work. I'd made such an effort for two years. I was working, making money, the BBC were offering me stuff, it was a nice time. Then I got to New York, and one of the stipulations of my visa was that I wasn't allowed to do any other work but acting – and I couldn't catch a cold! I'd walk into auditions and they'd say, 'You're great! You're good-looking, you're this, you're that – can you do an American accent?' And I say, 'Errrrr... No, not technically.'” He roars with laughter. “DUHH!!!! DIDN'T THINK ABOUT THAT!!! You'd have thought I'd have spent some of that time and money working on my accent!”

It was three years before he got his first job, CSI: Miami, then after that came The Wire. “I didn't know much about HBO at the time, cos I couldn't afford cable, he says. “I just knew that the producers of show produced Homicide, and Andre Braugher, who was and remains one of my favourite actors, was in that, and I was like, 'Yeah!' So I auditioned for about four or five weeks, I was constantly going back. By that stage I had mastered my American accent – in fact, the producer didn't know I was English. I told the casting director not to tell him, cos I wanted the job so badly.”

Though he's not talking in a US accent today, it's something he's clearly come to master, and he drops into it on more than one occasion. The accent isn't the hardest thing,” he explains, “it's the culture. Really and truly, if you slur your words a little bit, you sound American. But the bottom line is, it's learning the culture that makes you American. I lived here a long, long time before I got my first job, so by that time I was damn near American anyway. The other key thing is, if you try to speak with an American accent but you think with an English accent, it's never gonna come out right. You've gotta think with an American accent. And practise a lot. My mum rings me, and I'm like...” He adopts lazy bro-speak... “'Hey mom, what's good?' And she's like... He adopts what must be irate Ghanaian. “'Why are you TALKING like that??? You are NOT American!!!' But I have to do it. I feel like a pillock of course. My mates call me and say, 'Alright geezer, see the game last night?' I'll say, 'Aw, nah, mahhn...' They're like, 'Fack off, you cunt!'”

After tireless lobbying, Elba landed Stringer Bell, and the consequences were tremendous. “The character changed my life,” he says softly. “It gave me a lot of kudos. The Americans were bowled over by it because it depicted a world they didn't know about: Baltimore. It's a bit like Birmingham, and under Birmingham there's a sort of underground scene that's full of characters, and Baltimore's the same. And I guess when people realised I wasn't from Baltimore, it catapulted my exposure.”

Not, however, in terms of Hollywood. “Hollywood pretty much ignored The Wire, even though it's so critically acclaimed and everyone loves it. It's been called The Best Show On TV a thousand times. So it didn't give me a Hollywood profile, and I'm still building one now. The industry knows who the people on The Wire are, but I'm not a household name at this point at all.”

This, though, may soon change – indeed, Elba notes himself that “I was a supporting actor in The Wire, and now I'm getting leading roles. My career has always been varied. I don't play just drug dealers: I get lawyers, cops, all of it. Which is great. I can do it all. And now they realise I can do English too – well, duh! – so it's an interesting position to be in.” And after a string of thankless supporting roles in films as diverse as American Gangster, Prom Night and 28 Weeks Later, the first fruit of this new phase in his career sounds very promising too. “I just finished this film, called Obsessed, in which I play a married man, Beyonce Knowles plays my wife, and Ali Larter plays this girl who works for me temporarily in my office and falls for me. They're beautiful women. Beautiful women. I remember doing this scene one time, where Beyonce and Ali were fighting over me. We were rehearsing the scene, and they were going back and forth, cat-fighting. And then there was a long silence.” Even now, the scene amuses him. “Everyone looked at me, and a voice said, 'Idris, it's your line.' And everyone in the room, all the fellas, started laughing. Cos it was just so funny: I'm standing there thinking, 'Am I dreaming? This is Ali Larter and Beyonce, fighting over Idris.”

His voice trails off, then he laughs a last, big, dirty but contented laugh, perhaps thinking back to Deneuve, with whom this whole adventure started. Or even Mr Kipling, for that matter.

“Lovely...!”