In 2015, when he was a young actor from Peckham with a couple of theatre credits and, naturally, an episode of Casualty to his Equity card, Damson Idris somehow wangled a big TV audition in Los Angeles. The part was Franklin Saint, a bright kid in South Central LA during the 1980s who becomes a drug kingpin just as the city is on the cusp of a crack cocaine epidemic. Snowfall was the vision of John Singleton, the director of the seminal 1991 coming-of-age film Boyz n the Hood. Word was that every tyro black actor in America, and beyond, wanted to be cast as Franklin.
“The audition was about two, three weeks out,” recalls Idris, “so I went to my family and said, ‘Guys, I’m going to be in an American accent for three weeks and onwards if this process keeps going on. Don’t, don’t, don’t make no jokes. Don’t ask me, “Ahhhh, why are you talking like that?” No. My name’s Franklin and from now on you’re going to address me as Franklin. You hear that Mum?’ I was still living with my mum at the time. And she’s like, ‘Yeah, whatever. Go wash the dishes.’”
Idris looks affronted, then he cracks up, and mimes calling over his shoulder: “But I want you to address me as Franklin when I go wash the dishes.”
He landed the part, but it didn’t end there. A pilot of Snowfall was shot and FX, the network, hated it. It demanded the script be rewritten and every member of the cast – save Idris – replaced. He returned to south London and waited, and waited, too scared to commit to other long-term projects. “During that time, I was working in Lion King as an usher at the Lyceum Theatre,” he says. “I was at the front: ‘Programmes and brochures!’ Not even on stage, no way, no. And every day, I was thinking, ‘Man, this moment right here, one day it’s going to be different.’”
Much, certainly, is different now. For one thing, Idris no longer lives with his mum; he calls in for our interview from a modern-looking flat in Canada Water, southeast London, where he stays when he’s not in LA. Snowfall, meanwhile, which is shown on the BBC in the UK, is about to return for its fourth season. The show has developed into a slow-burn classic, ratcheting up the tension with a deftness and skill that has drawn comparisons to The Wire. If you are looking for a compulsive, smart boxset to fill your evenings, it’s here.
The 29-year-old Idris, meanwhile, is Snowfall’s break-out star, especially in the US. In downtime from the series, he has filmed an episode of Black Mirror, called Smithereens, alongside Andrew Scott, and appeared opposite Anthony Mackie in the Netflix sci-fi action film Outside the Wire. Charming and confident, Idris is a regular on American talk shows, friends with Sean “Diddy” Combs and the British Vogue editor Edward Enninful. And the practice he did with his family has paid off: most people he meets now can’t believe he isn’t American.
The attention is new, even unsettling; sometimes Idris is not sure they have got the right guy. He smiles, “It’s like, ‘My name is Damson Idris, are you sure you’re talking about me? I promise I’m not Daniel Kaluuya.’”
Another sign of how Idris’s life has changed is the company he keeps on Zoom these days. The week before we speak, he had been invited to a video-call birthday party for a friend, the photographer and music executive Lenny Santiago. He assumed it would just be him and maybe a couple of others, so he logged on at 5am (9pm LA time) from his bed, heavily jetlagged after a flight back from the States. Instead, around 40 little boxes popped up and a distinctive New York drawl piped up: “Eh man, this man’s in here topless with his nipples out and he got the grey headboard. Yo, who’s in charge of the Zoom? You see that guy Damson? Kick him out.”
It was Jay-Z; the comedians and actors Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Michael B Jordan and Tiffany Haddish were also on the call. “I just started seeing celeb after celeb and they’re all laughing and Jay-Z is just ripping into me,” says Idris. “But the next day his friend called me and said, ‘Jay-Z reached out and it was all jokes, like nothing serious.’ So that was good, because by that point, I’d already deleted Tidal [the music-streaming service Jay-Z backs]. I had to unblock Beyoncé after I found out that it was all jokes.”
Today, Idris’s torso is covered with a box-fresh black T-shirt, and in the background are posters for Snowfall and Farming, the searing 2018 film he made with Kate Beckinsale. “But hey,” he says, “I learned a good lesson in Zoom etiquette: never have a grey headboard behind you.”
There’s a long line of British actors who have had their dramatic break in the US playing Americans, from Dominic West to Idris Elba and John Boyega, even Hugh Laurie. But the stretch for Damson Idris could seem particularly foreboding: he wasn’t even born when the action in Snowfall was taking place; he’d never been to America before he turned up for that first audition. Idris, though, found a different link with his character.
“Growing up in Peckham, I’d look out my window and see a bunch of Franklins,” says Idris. “And the thing that made me connect to Franklin the most was that eagerness to do better, but being hindered by the system. And that’s what I bring to that character: that ambition. And it’s the ambition of anyone who grows up in poverty. They know they could do it, but they just don’t have the means to. And that’s what Franklin symbolises to me. That’s how I connect to him.”
Idris – full name Adamson Alade-Bo Idris, but always “Damson” at home – is the youngest of six children raised by his Nigerian mother Philippa on the North Peckham estate. This is the where 10-year-old Damilola Taylor was murdered in 2000; in headlines it was “the estate from hell”, one of the most deprived areas of Europe. All of Idris’s brothers and sisters have done well for themselves: they work in banking, law and IT. “I had the leeway to look at what they did,” he says, “and for them to say, ‘OK, I did this path. Now you can go off and be a stripper and we wouldn’t mind.’ So I was really fortunate to be the last born and have them walk the path before me.”
The initial plan for Idris was football. He had a trial at Charlton Athletic, but wasn’t used to playing on a full-size field. “I didn’t have the stamina,” he says. “I was like, ‘Wow, this pitch looks way bigger than my cage across the street.’” He was, however, recruited from thousands for the CBBC show Beckham’s Hotshots, where 20 kids competed for the prize of training with David Beckham in Madrid. Idris didn’t make the final cut, but fast-forward to a couple of years ago and he found himself at the British Fashion Awards with Vogue editor Enninful and Beckham.
“Edward is giving this spiel about who I am and Beckham is like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I love your work,’” says Idris, his impersonation of the footballer – like Jay-Z – pitch-perfect. “And I’m like, ‘Mr Beckham, you have no idea how much you mean to me. When I was 12, I went on Beckham’s Hotshots.’ And David Beckham’s like, ‘Ah maaate, you’re showing my age now.’”
Idris has always had a gift for mimicry and an incorrigible performative streak. He has also – as the images on these pages show – long had a taste for dressing up. On his Instagram, he posted a video taken by his sister on his sixth birthday and he’s smart as a button in a stiff white shirt and waistcoat. To camera, he tells us his favourite film is the 1995 buddy comedy Bad Boys, and recites a Martin Lawrence line through big gaps in his teeth.
“What was I doing watching Bad Boys at that age?” he says, shaking his head. “But I’ve always loved fashion and it’s because of my mum. When I was five, six years old, she would dress me up in three-piece golden suits with these black shiny leather church shoes with the gold buckle. And all my friends are wearing tracksuits and hats. I used to be so jealous.”
Idris thinks it is revealing that, despite the fact he was a natural ham, no one ever suggested acting when he was growing up. “No way, it was a footballer or a rapper,” he says. “None of my friends in Peckham thought about acting when we were around 14, 15.” Idris’s first experience came when he studied theatre, film and television at Brunel University – his sister talked him out of doing sports science, his preference. From there, he landed a role in the 2012 play Pandora’s Box at the Arcola Theatre in east London. He remembers he was paid £400 for a week’s work and, after taking out his agent’s cut, he spent the rest on a pair of Prada shoes.
“It was the happiest moment of my life buying those Prada shoes,” he says. “My mum worked at the Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge, and she would walk past Harrods every day and window shop and come home and tell me about all the amazing things she saw. So to get those shoes was a huge signifier that progress was being made, through doing what I loved. And even if it meant I was going to be broke for the next year, at least I still had my shoes.”
Idris has had a stop-start pandemic. He downloaded Duolingo to learn Spanish, but hasn’t got much further than “hola”. He considered buying a saxophone, but worried about the neighbours. And on Christmas Day, when he was on his own in LA, he was floored with Covid. “It was just a bad day,” he sighs. “People were sending me a bunch of food, because everyone knew I was celebrating Christmas alone, but I couldn’t taste any of it.”
Even the big releases Idris has had this year – the new season of Snowfall, Outside the Wire – are “bittersweet” because he is stuck at home with little idea of how people are responding to them. “The way I get through it,” he says, “is I call up my good friend Daniel Kaluuya, who’s winning a bunch of awards now for Judas and the Black Messiah. And I say, ‘How are you feeling?’ And he goes, ‘Terrible!’ And I’m like, ‘OK, great. I’m on the right path.’”
Idris obviously enjoys being in LA. “It’s Snowfall time, it’s vitamin D time,” he says. “When I’m in that country, when I’m in that city, I feel my most artistic for some reason.” And, for now, he’s single, so can flit between London and LA easily enough. “Yeah, I’m one of the unlucky ones,” he says. “But I want six kids, so I better get moving!”
Splitting his time between two cities meant that Idris walked in last year’s Black Lives Matter protests both in London’s Hyde Park and in LA. “Here’s the thing, it was exactly the same, the only difference was the accent,” he says. “The exact same passion that my African American brothers and sisters had when I was walking with them is the exact same passion my black British brothers and sisters had. Police brutality and the oppression of those who are seen as beneath, it’s a global thing. It was remarkable to experience both and it’s changed my whole outlook on activism going forward.”
There is much that Idris would like to achieve, both onscreen and off. John Singleton, the creator of Snowfall, died in 2019, aged 51, but he remains a guardian for Idris. The fact that Singleton picked him out to play Franklin, believed he could be convincing as a kid from South Central when he had never even been to America, gives him confidence that he can do anything. “I think… he saw the future me, he’d always say that,” recalls Idris. “He’d always say, ‘You remind me of Denzel Washington.’ He’d call me ‘Dam-zel’. He’d be like, ‘Oh, man, when I was casting for Boyz n the Hood, Laurence Fishburne used to do that.’ He’d always name a giant who I admire and set the path for me almost.”
If he’s thinking big, then how about Bond? It’s the most hackneyed question in film journalism, but Idris is the right age, looks the part and has the requisite swagger and humour to be in the frame when the next 007 is selected. He doesn’t flinch. “I always used to be wary,” he says. “I was like, ‘How could Bond be black? If Bond walks into an all-white Russian bar, and they’re like, ‘I’ve heard James Bond is here.’ And it’s like, ‘Where is he? I heard he’s black.’ Haha!”
But when Idris stops laughing, he turns serious. “I think the direction we’re moving in complements having a Bond who’s a person of colour,” he goes on. “And well, I love wearing suits, so who knows?”
Damson Idris is represented by Elite London and Laraview PR. Outside the Wire is on Netflix
Photographer Danny Kasirye; Stylist Helen Seamons; Photographer’s assistant Jem Rigby; fashion assistant Peter Bevan; grooming Nohelia Reyes using Armani Beauty and Equi Botanics; shot at Holborn Studios