It's a Saturday afternoon in late spring, and the Farmers' Market in London's Notting Hill neighborhood is bustling: People mill about the tents and tables, blissfully shopping for organically grown tomatoes, raw milk, and little gem lettuce. A white Range Rover pulls up and Idris Elba steps onto the sidewalk. He is dressed in black, from his loafers to the oversized beanie cocked atop his head, and from the looks of it—eyes lowered, hands in pockets—he is doing his best to go unnoticed.
Not gonna happen. As he heads for a nearby restaurant called Electric House, the market comes to a halt. All eyes are on him. Okay, so maybe the market doesn't come to a complete standstill and perhaps not everyone turns his way, but close to it. Honey, honey, look . . . ohmygod! Ohmygod! Ohmygod! If this were a market in Topeka—or, heaven help him, Baltimore—the forty-four-year-old Elba would most likely be recognized as Stringer Bell, the Machiavellian heroin dealer he played on the HBO series The Wire. In the UK, where he was raised, he's better known as the Golden Globe-winning star of Luther, the BBC series on which he plays a gifted detective with a disastrous personal life. Today, however, he's called out for a role he's never had and may never play: Just as Elba ducks into the restaurant, an enthusiastic fan cups his hands around his mouth and shouts, "Idris, you gonna be 007?"
The rumor that Elba is in line to play James Bond has endured for years. In 2014, in one of the thousands of emails made public when Sony Pictures was hacked, then-studio cochair Amy Pascal told a colleague, "Idris should be the next Bond." Steven Spielberg said in an interview that Elba would be his "first choice" to fill Daniel Craig's tux. Elba has long maintained that the conversation is moot; no one, so far as he knows, is seriously considering him for the role.
Nevertheless, the rumor's persistence highlights a large part of what makes Elba such a rare talent. Why did Pascal intuit that he had the qualities required to play a continent-hopping man of mystery? For the same reason each one of his hypermasculine characters is so memorable: The guy has an invaluable Something Else, a swagger and self-confidence that he brings to every scene even before he utters a line. Hany Abu-Assad, who directed Elba and Kate Winslet in The Mountain Between Us, a plane-crash-survival movie out this October, says that "with Idris, you immediately think, This is a man who is going to survive. This is a man you can count on. This is a man who can handle anything."
Aaron Sorkin, who cast Elba as a criminal-defense lawyer in his upcoming directorial debut, Molly's Game, tells me, "There are certain things an actor can't fake. They can't act smart, they can't act being funny, they can't act like they have gravitas...Idris brings all those things. Plus, he can act." It was, he says, an easy decision: "If Idris Elba says he wants to play a part, that's pretty much the end of your casting search."
Electric House has an ambience that might be described as mod-Dickensian. As the host leads us to a table in back, many patrons, from the well-heeled hipsters to the casually dapper young parents with their more-dapper children, get wide-eyed and whisper in our direction. Elba fixes his gaze forward, outwardly unaffected by the attention. He slides into a U-shaped booth that seems large until his wide frame occupies it. This month, Elba stars in The Dark Tower, a sci-fi thriller based on the Stephen King series that is set in a part-Blade Runner, part-spaghetti-western multiverse. He plays the Gunslinger, the solitary hero who survives through his superior instincts and weaponry skills. Nikolaj Arcel, the director of the movie, says that talking to Elba is like "looking up at the sky." Even seated, he has a commanding presence.
Almost immediately, Elba is the one doing the interviewing. "I think my life is pretty well documented," he tells me. "If you look me up, you're gonna find some shit." He rests his hands on the table, fingertips pressed together professorially; his eyes are locked on mine. "And that must be—not disheartening but discouraging for a journalist." He pauses. I wait. He continues: "Like, How the fuck do I approach this to get anything that no one else has read before? What is that approach?" He takes a sip of Johnnie Walker Black and Diet Coke and tilts his head to the side, never dropping his stare.
Fair question, but let's give it a shot. One approach, at least the one to understanding how Elba came to be one of Hollywood's most compelling leading men, begins with his father, Winston. Between bites of steak, flame-licked to well-done, he tells me about some advice Winston once gave him. " 'Look whoever you're talking to in the eyes. Don't look away. Two reasons: You can tell whether they are lying. Also, so that they can see whatever you're saying you mean and you can connect to that person.' That's great advice for a young actor."
Elba was born in Hackney, one of London's poorest boroughs, not long after Winston, from Sierra Leone, and his Ghanaian wife, Eve, emigrated to the UK in the 1970s. Whereas many of his friends ended up on the dole or dealing drugs, Elba, an only child, devoted his energy to music. As a little kid, he'd turn cereal boxes into make-believe turntables. At fourteen, he worked part-time with an uncle who had a DJ business and was soon spinning at gigs of his own.
At eighteen, Elba attended the National Youth Music Theatre, a prestigious school for the arts. Winston, who worked at a Ford plant, ponied up the money for the tuition not covered by a grant. Though music was Elba's first creative passion, his drama classes captivated him more. After he finished the program, he got a job at the auto plant, working the night shift in order to make auditions during the day. He nabbed bit parts on BBC series including Crimewatch, playing characters too small to have proper names—Drug Dealer, Delivery Man—and appeared as a gigolo on Absolutely Fabulous.
It was his parents' pilgrimage to London that inspired Elba to try his luck in New York. "I was not afraid of this concept of flying from the nest," he tells me. "I thought, It's a big jump, but fuck it, I'm going to move to another country. That came from my dad. He made a journey." By 2001, two years after he married makeup artist Kim Norgaard, he had a pregnant wife and an apartment just outside the city. Elba says he spent hours hanging out at a Brooklyn barbershop to work on his American accent. He landed one-off roles here and there, including a small part on Law & Order, but those didn't provide enough to live on. He picked up DJ gigs, worked as a doorman at the renowned comedy club Carolines, and sold weed. If he heard of an audition back in London that seemed like it was worth the flight, he'd go.
Elba's peripatetic lifestyle put a strain on his marriage. He and Norgaard broke up before she gave birth to their daughter, now fifteen. He'd been living out of a Chevy Astro van on the streets for three months when he went to audition for a part on a new HBO series called The Wire.
The role that changed his life, as Elba puts it, came as a consolation prize. He badly wanted to play drug kingpin Avon Barksdale. David Simon, the show's creator, was on the casting team; he tells me he had no idea Elba was from London because the actor never broke his American accent throughout the audition process. After several callbacks, the Wire team informed Elba that they wanted him not for Barksdale but for Stringer Bell.
"I was like, 'Great, great!' " Elba says. "But really, I was like, Who?" As initially sketched out in the pilot, Bell came off as a shrewd Baltimore dealer, but Elba set out to make the character more his own, as though asking himself, How the fuck do I approach this to get anything that no one else has done before? "Where I grew up, gangsters had to be smart," he says. "That whole flashy thing—no, mate. It was suits and smiles. I said, 'That's how I'm going to make Stringer.' "
At the end of season three, just as Bell's fan appeal was peaking, Simon wrote the character off the show. Elba was stunned. As a rule, Simon would give scripts to the actors shortly before filming. He didn't want them to know when their characters were being killed off until the last minute. "Actors have enough of a burden bringing the soul of a character to life," says Simon. "If they know they're going to die, no matter how professional the actor is, they can't help but approach the character differently. They'll drink their last cup of coffee like they know it's their last cup of coffee."
The day he talked to Elba about Bell's demise, The Wire was filming in a cemetery. As they walked among the headstones, Simon assured Elba that Bell wasn't being killed off because of anything the actor had done wrong. Simon recalls saying, "This death is going to make people sit up and take notice because of the story arc. It's going to be a remarkable moment for you, Idris. After people see this, you're going to have film roles coming at you to pick and choose."
Simon was right about the recognition, but his prediction about Elba's career wasn't quite as accurate. For several years, Elba found himself in a run of mostly forgettable movies and television series, including Girlfriends, Sometimes in April, Jonny Zero, Daddy's Little Girls, and Obsessed.
A seven-episode role on NBC's The Office, in 2009, proved a turning point. Elba played the calculating nemesis of Steve Carell's Michael Scott. His comedic turn brought him to the attention of Sorkin and others, which led to offers on a wider range of projects. He landed the lead on Luther, which became a smash hit in the UK, and costarred in a series of Hollywood action flicks, including Prometheus and Pacific Rim. In 2013, he played the title character in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination.
Though Winston was pleased that his son had found work doing what he loved, he was never much impressed by Elba's turns in Luther and the others. But the day Elba told his dad he'd be playing Nelson Mandela, Winston wept. "I cannot believe my son has been asked to play that great man," Elba recalls his father saying.
After Elba showed him the film, in 2013, Winston said that his son's depiction of Mandela reminded him of his own father, Moses. "It's funny you say that," Elba told his father, "because I was trying to be you." As he tells me about this moment, Elba quietly lowers his head for a few seconds, then looks up and smiles. "I'm glad my dad got to see that."
Winston, who was a smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer that year. At the time, Elba was dating Naiyana Garth, who, like his ex-wife, was a makeup artist. On Elba's birthday, seven days before his father died, he and Garth visited Winston to tell him they were expecting. "If it's a boy," he replied, "you must call him Winston." Seven months after Elba buried his father, Garth gave birth to their son, now three, and they did just that.
"He was seventy-two. Too young," Elba says. "He had so much life in him. My old man wanted to do so much more. He just didn't get a chance."
Experiencing his father's death, Elba says, contributed to the onset of a midlife crisis. "I got to a place where I wasn't even living anymore. I was becoming a robot with my work. I have no fear of jumping out of burning cars or out of buildings on set, but in reality, I couldn't run one hundred meters. I just felt out of touch with reality," he says. His friends teased him affectionately, calling him Moprah—as in Male Oprah. To heal, he thought about another piece of advice his father gave him: "Fear nothing. Do what you want to do, but be educated and intelligent and confident about it."
Elba decided he wasn't going to miss the chances life presented. "I had forgotten what it is to feel that burn on your tongue, when your adrenaline is going so much and you're in fight or flight. I was like, I'll be tired when I'm dead. . . . I just thought, Yo, Dris, do you want to do something crazy? Should we just try to make a documentary?"
Thus was born Idris Elba: No Limits, a four-part series on Discovery UK that afforded the actor the opportunity to put himself in fight-or-flight situations, sometimes literally. Starting in early 2015 and over the course of several months, Elba took to Pendine Sands beach in Wales in a 626-horsepower Bentley Continental GT Speed and hit 180.361 miles per hour, shattering the eighty-eight-year-old record; he learned to fly a stunt plane and beat three experienced actual pilots in an aerobatics competition; he completed the Circuit of Ireland Rally. In the follow-up series, Idris Elba: Fighter, he won his professional kickboxing debut by knockout. "I could have been sitting in a comfortable place and earning the dough, going, I wish, I wish. But my way of being a popular male actor is to say, 'Dudes, if I can do it, you can fucking do it.' "
Also in 2015, he took on his gutsiest role yet: as the Commandant, the ruthless rebel leader of a battalion of child soldiers in Africa, in Beasts of No Nation. Written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, one of the minds behind the excellent first (but not the terrible second) season of True Detective, Beasts is relentlessly dark. And Elba took a despicable character and rendered him a man viewers couldn't ignore or soon forget.
He earned another Golden Globe nomination and a Screen Actors Guild Award. An Oscar nod, it seemed, was guaranteed: In the days leading up to the announcement of the 2016 Academy Award nominations, FiveThirtyEight reported that Elba was the online gambling world's 6-to-1 favorite for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Yet his name wasn't on the list of nominees; the names of five white actors were. This, along with other perceived snubs of actors of color, reignited the debate about diversity in Hollywood, hashtagged #OscarsSoWhite, that had begun the previous year. Once the dust settled, what remained was Elba's stunning performance.
This November, he's reprising his role as Thor's right-hand man in November's Thor: Ragnarok. In Molly's Game, he stars opposite Jessica Chastain, whose character is busted for running an illegal high-stakes poker game. Meanwhile, the risk taking continues unabated: He's about to start production on a thriller called Yardie, which will mark his directorial debut. And he doesn't shy away from controversy. Discussing The Dark Tower, which is studded with elaborately choreographed shoot-outs, he says, "I had a clash of conscience with my character. In America, there's a real awareness of gun culture. I had to break down why he's good at shooting. We erred on the side of 'This is his tool. It's set in this world that's part of Stephen King's imagination, and it is what it is. . . .' I'll probably be crucified by the film company for even mentioning this."
I ask a question before he heads off to review script changes for Yardie. Since his midlife crisis, Elba has launched a successful clothing line with Superdry; become an Officer of the Order of the British Empire; and given a speech to Parliament about promoting diversity in British television and film. Is there anything he thinks he can't do?
"I'm not good at building furniture."
How does he know?
"I've tried it."
Of course he has.
Idris Elba photographed by Victor Demarchelier at The Savoy, London.
