Idris Elba DJing in early June. Photo / Getty Images
The British star won’t be boxed in by Hollywood. He talks about breaking up fights, being a modern man and his new Apple TV+ show, Hijack.
Idris Elba does what he wants. He is one of the most famous British actors in the world but he is also a podcaster, a restaurateur, a skincare entrepreneur, a DJ and a committed philanthropist. “There are people out there who don’t care that I’m an actor,” he says, with pride.
Before he was any of these things, Elba, 50, made his name as Stringer Bell in the television-defining HBO series The Wire. There are some actors who would feel pressure after that to only do critic-friendly, cerebral hits.
Elba, not so much. He has appeared in everything from the Thor and Avengers film franchises to a biopic of the South African leader Nelson Mandela.
His new offering, Hijack, an Apple TV+ thriller that follows the journey of a hijacked plane on its seven-hour flight to London, is many things. But primarily it is a lot of fun. From Sonic the Hedgehog to The Fast and the Furious, if something fun is going on Elba’s usually in the mix. Because he does what he wants.
This man who was often hyped as the next James Bond, who had Hollywood at his mercy after The Wire, ready to be the next leading man, has carved his own rather idiosyncratic path. Is he perhaps a bit too cool for Tinseltown, happier on his London barge, DJing in Kilburn and running boxing gyms for kids?
He grins. “Thumbs up. I’m not satisfied just being an actor. I’ve had that Hollywood moment ... and I still feel like I’m a human being, so I might just go open another boxing gym somewhere in Africa. Why not?”
Being a father, he tells me, is the most important thing to him. He has two children, and is married to the model Sabrina Dhowre, his third wife whom he proposed to in 2018 in an East London cinema. In this and many other things Elba models a kind of ideal modern masculinity.
“I’ve played all sorts of characters that live on each spectrum of masculinity, if you like, or machismo,” he says. In Hijack he plays Sam Nelson, a passenger in first class who luckily makes his living as a top-end business negotiator. He must establish who the hijackers are, what they want and how to stop them. Nelson, Elba says, falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum of masculinity; he is emotionally vulnerable but has the skills to get the job done.
His character is a negotiator, not a fighter, and Elba sees something of himself in that. He recalls trying to get between two men who were fighting, a long time ago. “I nearly got smashed in the face. I remember thinking, ‘Why am I doing this right now? This has nothing to do with me.’ But I just wanted to appeal to him. Because I could sense that if I had said some things to him, he might just calm down.”
In a society wringing its hands over the dearth of role models for our young men — and the awfulness of those such as Andrew Tate who have filled the void — you could do worse than Elba, sharply dressed and equally happy designing skincare products as kickboxing in the gym.
Elba reckons he would respond to a hijacking the same way as he did to that fight. “I would be, like, ‘Mate, you shouldn’t do it. Should we just figure out a way to land this plane and go home? Because we’re gonna go to jail for a long time, or we’re all gonna die. And what is the point?’ That’s what I would say. [Although] Sam articulated it way better than that.”
Articulating is Sam Nelson’s thing. Like Sherlock Holmes, he is an ordinary man who sees things that nobody else does, always two chess moves ahead. George Kay, the executive producer of Hijack, made his name with Lupin, the hit French series that also featured an ordinary man with extraordinary abilities. “Making our superhero as normal and relatable as possible was the guiding principle,” Kay says.
The pair are unashamedly populist in their intention. “People saying, ‘Yes, we expect you to be in a classical piece and do that sort of part.’ That’s not exciting to me,” Elba says.
Again, Elba does pretty much as he pleases. Has he ever had any backlash for putting on a Marvel cape, as others like Florence Pugh have?
He looks mildly perplexed. “I haven’t had anyone say that to me. But I’m sure they say that.” He is wholly unbothered. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “If I’m sitting in a room with some of the greatest actors in the world and they go, ‘Oh, my son loves you in the Marvel movies,’ I’m, like, ‘Eek’,” he says, adopting a self-mocking falsetto and feigning squeamishness.
The only time Elba appears to be having anything short of an excellent time is when I ask him about the role that race has played in his career. He recently caused a minor kerfuffle when he told Esquire magazine that “racism is very real, but from my perspective it’s only as powerful as you allow it to be. I stopped describing myself as a black actor when I realised it put me in a box.”
My attempt to ask about this is met with a heavy sigh. “If you don’t mind, Charlotte, I’m honestly just not even going to open that Pandora’s box. If I do that, that’s what the articles end up being about. And I’m not suggesting that you will do that. But we moved on 10 years ago from that conversation, in my opinion.”
And so we talk instead about the future. We talk about Elba’s work with the Prince’s Trust. He is an ambassador for the charity that launched his career with a grant that enabled him to attend the National Youth Music Theatre, when he was a working-class boy in Canning Town, East London, the only child of a Sierra Leonean father who emigrated to London in the 60s and worked at Ford Dagenham, and a Ghanian mother who was an office adminstrator. Elba was tall and big, which made other boys want to fight him. He found refuge in drama classes. Before The Wire he’d grifted away at bit parts, living in a van because he couldn’t afford rent. Does he feel optimistic for the futures of children like him today?
“I do,” says Elba, who has worked to try to stamp out knife crime. “[Although] my optimism is a bit marred by the fact that I know that in England we still have many knife crime issues and young people dying or going to jail.” People don’t pay enough attention, he says. Why?
He looks pained. “I think some of it is related to proximity, you know. Some communities think it’s just in one community and therefore it doesn’t affect us ... so I do think that we do need to recognise it as a nation. That it’s everyone’s problem, whether it’s in your community or not.” As he speaks, I am reminded that there are people who don’t care that Elba is an actor. In this moment, it seems, neither does he.
The seven-part thriller Hijack is on available to stream on Apple TV+
Written by: Charlotte Ivers
© The Times of London
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