We love you, Idris Elba – but this ‘embarrassing uncle’ phase needs to end

Idris Elba became synonymous with “cool” in 2002, when the actor broke Hollywood’s ranks as drug-dealing gangster Stringer Bell in HBO’s The Wire. The character was pure masculine fantasy: he was a bad boy, but he was smart. He could kill you if he wanted to, but he also studied economics. He was hard, guarded and misunderstood – too complicated to love, but desperately in need of saving. Essentially, the kind of guy that women meticulously invent in their daydreams; the kind that men resent and respect in equal measure.

And, because Elba was little known before he got the role – jobbing as a DJ and doorman at a Brooklyn comedy club, while sleeping in his van – he was a blank canvas. So we imprinted Stringer onto him. When Elba was killed off in season three, he was still Stringer. His voice still sounded like a steel boot scuffing up gravel. He was still six-foot-three and weighed 200 pounds. He actually smoked. He had tattoos. He’d had it tough growing up. Did anyone know who he actually was? Not particularly. But he was effortlessly, ineffably cool. 

In 2010, as the UK audiences were beginning to realise 38-year-old Elba was actually British – born in East London to a Ghanian father and mother from Sierra Leone – he was cast as mysterious, moody detective John Luther. OK, he’d swapped his wifebeater for a tweed overcoat, but the character still checked the hallowed hallmarks of idealised masculinity: intelligence, power, physical prowess, with enough of an Achilles heel and inner turmoil to make him suitably obscure and complicated.

Naturally, British GQ put Elba on the front of their 2013 Cool Issue, where he leans back over the handlebars of a personalised motorbike. Inexplicably, however, Elba looks positively uncool, wearing a boyish stripy T-shirt, which, paired with a white cap and an expression contorted by a strange, double-eyed wink, his mouth flopping agape, has him resembling a hapless, drunken sailor.

But it didn’t matter, because Elba had also been pretty cool in the Marvel movie Thor as a warrior with golden eyes, and also as a brave and sturdy captain in sci-fi thriller Prometheus – although neither role brought critical acclaim.

Whereas Elba’s initial blow-up had been off the back of his acting chops – he won a Golden Globe for Luther, an SAG Award and four Emmys – comments on his ongoing success soon became limited to physical appreciation and a (possibly racially problematic) fetishisation of his “charisma”. There seemed to be no appetite to peel back the surface; to get to know him a little more. His male colleagues, meanwhile, from Tom Hardy to Bradley Cooper, were met with much meatier analysis.

Four months later, Elba covered US GQ’s The How-To Issue, sharply attired in a grey pinstriped suit and a brow so furrowed it could leave a tunnel in its wake. In fact, by 2013, he had played so many cool, hulking, macho men that rumours began to circulate that he could, in fact, play the coolest of them all: Bond. And for the next four years, Elba was not so much a person as a mood. 

It was around this time, however, that Elba began to rebel; to break out from the 2D stencil the press had carved out and shoved him in, and to talk about himself in real terms.

In interviews, he began to quash questions about him being “the first black Bond” with irritated silence. He didn’t like it when interviewers focused on Stringer. “Because I think you're looking at Idris right now but, I don't know, maybe you’re just seeing Stringer… it’s too limiting, I want to surprise people. I want you to not expect what I do,” he told the Guardian.

Instead, Elba started to talk about music. Some fans were vaguely aware of his hobby as a DJ. He sometimes played residencies at Ibiza’s Pikes hotel, and in 2010 had released an under-the-radar hip-hop mixtape, High Problems, with the moniker Big Driis (it’s not on Spotify).

In 2014 he released the album Mi Mandela, inspired by his starring turn as the South African leader in Mandela: Long Road to Freedom, and then an the album John Loves Murdah, inspired by Luther. But Elba hadn’t promoted his musical output, and, with fans allergic to the all-too ubiquitous multi-hyphenate celebrity (you only have to look at the vitriol served to Kim Kardashian for pursuing law or Cara Delevingne for acting), they decidedly ignored it. 

Elba realised this, telling Esquire: “There is that risk of people going, ‘Oh, Idris again’, especially in this country where it’s like, ‘oh mate, stay in your lane… we want to see success, but we don’t want people rubbing it in our faces, you know. You have to be careful to not find yourself overstretched and not watered-down.”

And yet it was clear that for Elba, music was something much more important than a side-hustle, particularly since starring as Mandela, his film roles had ceased to challenge him. Critics barely mentioned him.

“Idris, when he is acting, I don’t think he is content,” Guillermo Del Toro, who directed Elba as yet another military commander in Pacific Rim, told US GQ. Elba agreed. “Because my music is so much more truthful about my art – me – than my acting is,” he said to the Guardian. “Music comes from my soul. I can connect with you more through my music.”

And so Elba’s rebellion continued quietly and unobtrusively. In 2015, he scored another blockbuster role, Beasts of No Nation, which, for the first time in many years, led to widespread and well-deserved critical attention, including a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Bafta nomination.

And yet the role also felt consistent with what the public expected him to play: a mighty and corrupt West African warlord asking unspeakable things of his army of child guerrilla soldiers. Cue another round of magazine covers and idolatry interviews, in which, curiously, Elba began to open up a little further, admitting, for instance, that his son had failed a paternity test, and therefore wasn’t his by blood.

This admission did little to further flesh out Elba’s public persona, however, and his aesthetic, rather than an acknowledgement of Elba’s specific talent or tangible trait, continued to be his USP. “Whatever ‘it’ is, Elba has it in droves,” wrote Interview magazine.

In 2017, after Elba played a clever lawyer alongside Jessica Chastain in poker-game drama Molly’s Game, the producer Amy Pascal described him as “the best version of masculinity… maybe it’s the way he walks, like his legs are more powerful than anyone else, like he is gravity… it’s rare, undeniable, movie-star stuff.”

People magazine crowned him 2017’s Sexiest Man Alive. And yet his role in Molly’s Game was barely mentioned in reviews, while his other major film of 2017, The Mountains Between Us – in which Elba played a straight-laced heroic brain surgeon who saves Kate Winslet after a plane crash – was a total non-event. Elba, in the right film, could be brilliant. Why was nobody handing him any decent roles?

In 2018, perhaps to make up for his lack of fulfilment on screen, Elba began to spread himself ever thinner across a range of projects. It was as if he were trying to throw everything he had at the wall before figuring out what might stick. Or, quite possibly, to dismount the pedestal he’d been placed upon in the only way he could: to quite unceremoniously throw himself off. 

He launched two clothing lines, one named Two Hour Set (in homage to his DJing). He opened a London cocktail bar called The Parrot, to which no one seems ever to have been. And he wrote In the Long Run, drawing heavily on his memories of his father, while becoming increasingly vocal about his music in interviews and on social media.

Fans were accepting enough of his DJing, since Elba actually wasn’t actually half bad behind the decks, and in April he’d been called upon by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to DJ at their wedding, before impressing with a debut set at Coachella. He wasn’t ever going to host a Boiler Room, and Pitchfork still refused to cover any of his musical projects, but Elba had not disgraced himself. Also, he seemed happy. Why would anyone wish him otherwise?

What we would all collectively try to ignore, however, was Elba’s increasing insistence on establishing himself as a rapper. Back in 2010, when he released a video as King Driis, the Guardian described him “sounding like an unwanted guest on his own song” and mocked his cod-Jamaican accent on account of Elba having no ties to the island. The video has since been deleted, and it’s unlikely many will have been aware of the song’s existence.

But this January, Elba moved bolder: featuring in grime MC Wiley’s cheerfully mainstream rap song Boasty, alongside Stefflon Don and Sean Paul. It got to number 11 in the charts, a decent position, and Elba’s distinctly terrible verse (featuring shudder-inducing lyrics such as “Man a big DJ, ask Meghan and Harry” and “And I write for myself, no ghosty”) was, thankfully, sheltered by the song’s blanket mediocrity.

Unfortunately, however, it coincided with another career low: the return of Luther, Series 5, which received middling to downright critical reviews, ending on not so much a bang as a limp guff. The Telegraph’s Ed Power concluded that, if anything was going to put a halt to those Bond rumours, it was this. 

And so the actor turned his attention to another pick ’n’ mix assortment of passion projects: a documentary in which he becomes a professional kick-boxer; a play, Tree, at the Young Vic, which backfired after two playwrights accused him and the Young Vic’s artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah of using their ideas without due credit (charges the pair denied); and another autobiographical sitcom, Netflix’s Turn Up Charlie, in which Elba plays a washed-up DJ and tragic bachelor, Charlie.

This has, without a doubt, been Elba’s nadir. In a two star review, Rolling Stone described it as “less a TV show than a checklist of things Elba wanted to do on camera.” With uninspiring dialogue, cookie cutter characters and a lead role for Elba that, quite frankly, would only have been acceptable for a burgeoning actor in their early twenties – he gets caught by a family member in flagrante delicto, for instance – the show received a 50 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a second season has not been announced.

Scroll the YouTube comments beneath the trailer and reactions range from “this is dire” to “what has Idris Elba done?” The new second season of In The Long Run didn’t help, nor did Elba allowing Vogue to cover his wedding to Sabrina Dhowre in an astonishingly C-list celebrity move, with one shot even making the magazine’s special bridal subscriber cover. 

Nevertheless, many Elba fans thought he might wipe the slate clean again as bionic superhero in this summer’s Fast & Furious spin-off, Hobbs & Shaw. Alas, the superhero was called, of all things, Brixton, and delivered memorably corny one-liners such as: “I’m a black superman!”

The film received bleak reviews, and Elba revealed that on set he was continuously roasted by co-stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Jason Statham for his upcoming furry turn as Macavity opposite Judi Dench in a live action remake of the musical Cats, for which he had to attend “cat school”. Had our “King of Cool” become Britain’s most beloved, but embarrassing uncle? 

Or – whisper it – perhaps this is where Elba belonged all along: with all of Hollywood’s regular dudes. After all, Tom Hardy read a CBBC bedtime story and got away it, and Tom Hiddleston was forgiven for pretending he went out with Taylor Swift.

David Arquette loves knitting and Bradley Cooper and Ryan Gosling both made two of the softest films in the last decade – and sang in them – without finding themselves exiled to the loser step alongside Liam Neeson and Gerard Butler. Had we not inflated Elba to absurd proportions, he wouldn’t have popped so loud.

Perhaps, too, Hollywood should take some responsibility. Did no one listen to Elba when he addressed Parliament about the lack of diversity on screen, saying: “There are only so many best friends, gang leaders or athletic types” that he could play?

No wonder he’s been forced to stretch the mould on his own: after all, cheesy sitcoms are as far away as he could get from his repertoire of bland, brooding heroes. There’s no doubt Elba can be funny: just not with his own script.

Or perhaps, despite all of this, Elba’s sliding reputation is just a local concern. British fans, after all, are particularly sensitive to heroes making fools of themselves, and besides, it’s unlikely any Elba disciples across the pond have heard of grime, let alone listened to Boasty. They certainly won’t have watched his sitcoms; they’ll probably think Cats is a documentary. 

Case in point: in March Elba hosted the Met Gala, and in May he hosted Saturday Night Live. In August, he covered Vanity Fair. The coverline? “How Idris Elba Became the Coolest Man in Hollywood!” Although, just to make sure: they had Elba wearing a leather jacket, and in his hands were a pair of shades.