Idris Elba has an announcement to make: if you own a Ford Fiesta manufactured
between 1989 and 1990 – when the British actor was still working the night
shift at Ford’s factory in Dagenham – the chances are you bought a lemon.
“There’s a good handful of ’em where the seals on the bottom aren’t done
property, because that was my job,” says Elba, 35, whose career has since
taken a rather more lucrative direction, to include playing the antihero of The
Wire (said by some to be the best American TV show since The Sopranos)
and, most recently, co-starring in Guy Ritchie’s new film, RocknRolla.
“The cars would come along the line, and I ’ad this big soldering gun, but
it was the night shift, and I kept falling asleep. I’d look up and the car
had gone down the line and I’d missed a good nine spots. Those cars must be
falling apart by now.” At this point Elba leans over to speak directly into
my digital voice recorder: “If one of ’em belongs to you, dear reader, I’m
sorry about that. That was me.”
Elba’s journey from narcoleptic spot-welder to Hollywood’s A-List-in-waiting
has been an unusual one. He grew up in Hackney, East London, with a mum from
Ghana and a dad from Sierra Leone – both of whom speak Creole. He left
school at 16 and won a place in the National Youth Music Theatre – thanks to
a £1,500 Prince’s Trust grant – but then ended up having to do everything
from tyre fitting to cold-call advertising sales to pay the rent between
roles in Crimewatch murder reconstructions. Yet it was the job at
the Ford plant – where Elba’s dad worked – that convinced him not to give
up.
“It was ambition-building for me,” he recalls, his muffled Hackney accent
sounding utterly incongruous in the bar of the Beverly Hills hotel in which
we’re sitting. “I’d see all these guys who’d been there 50 years, their skin
had turned into leather, their hands had veins as big as f*****’ worms,
y’know what I mean? I thought, I don’t want to be that.”
On his last night at the factory he stole an electric car and drove it around
the grounds for his entire shift. “My old man finally found me and said,
‘Your shop steward is screaming at me, trying to work out where the f*** you
are’. I said, ‘I’m leaving dad, I’m going to America in the morning.’ ” Two
days later, he was in New York. Eventually, the move become permanent. But
America wasn’t easy at first: “You’re black with a British accent, and
they’re like [he makes a face] ‘Say that again?’ ”
In the end the 6ft 5in actor went native. “I was trying so hard to desperately
pretend that I was American. I just walked around all day practising my
accent and seeing if I could fool people, like bus drivers.” Another
problem: in spite of his roles in successful British shows such as Ultraviolet,
he was pretty much unknown in the US. So between acting gigs he worked as a
DJ. He also married his British girlfriend and had a daughter with her –
although, by the sounds of it, the relationship was doomed from the
beginning.
Then, finally, came Elba’s chance: the role of an aspirational Baltimore drug
kingpin named Stringer Bell in The Wire(the character of Bell was
so fixated on success that he kept a copy of Adam Smith’s The
Wealth of Nationson his bookshelf). Clearly Elba saw a lot of himself in
the role, which was originally conceived by HBO as being little more than a
bit-part. He carried it off with an accent so convincing that many of The
Wire’s viewers still have no idea he’s British – never mind a Cockney.
“That character and I mirrored each other in many ways,” he says. “He was
ridiculously ambitious, very good at multitasking, and he was courageous. He
who dares wins, man. It’s a cliché to say it, but it’s really true.I’ve
taken some f*****’ risks, and if I hadn’t taken those risks I wouldn’t
be here, without a doubt. It’s all about not allowing the fear of failure to
cripple ya. I love it if you tell me I can’t do somethin’.”
Bell was eventually machine-gunned out of the script, but by then Elba had
clinched parts in such big-time Hollywood productions as American Gangster,
playing opposite Denzel Washington (with whom he has been often compared),
and Obsessed, inwhich he stars with Beyoncé Knowles (the movie is a Fatal
Attraction-style affair, out next Valentine’s Day).
Only then, almost a decade after leaving Britain – and by this point a
bona fide American celebrity – was Elba offered a movie role in which
he could use his native Hackney stutter: that of Mumbles, one of the central
comic trio in RocknRolla. “I was in this very hotel and Guy calls me
and says, ‘I’m doing this movie and I want you to be in it.’ I thought:
perfect. And the script was crackin’. ”
But didn’t Elba have second thoughts, given that Richie’s career is now close
to a national joke? “ Swept Away, I didn’t see,” he says. “I
saw Revolver. It was a beautiful-looking film, but it just lost me,
completely. This movie, RocknRolla, is a step in the direction that
we knew ’im for.” Elba says he likes the film but worries if the plot about
a property deal gone awry – the two parties are an East End mobster and
Russian oligarch – might be too dense.
“It’s a lot of stuff,” he says. “A lot.” So what’s Guy Ritchie like to work
with? There’s a long pause. “He’s a w*****,” Elba says, firmly. Another long
pause. I laugh uneasily. Elba doesn’t crack the merest hint of a smile.
“Guy’s very calm and collected on the outside and he works extensively on
trying to rid himself of any kind of angst,” he goes on. “He has interesting
people skills: he sort of engages with you and at the same time has his mind
elsewhere . . .” A w*****, then? “The whole experience was wicked for me,”
Elba says, suddenly changing tack. “Although it was very surreal when his
wife would show up.”
Ah, yes: the redoubtable Mrs Ritchie – otherwise known as Madonna. Did he
get to know her? “I said hi, how are you, she was very, y’know, in and out.”
Any signs of the much-rumoured marital strife? “They were seemingly fine.
But I honestly couldn’t tell you. I wasn’t paying attention.”
I ask if Elba was surprised by the homoeroticism in RocknRolla –
in particular, the storyline about a small-time crook named Handsome Bob,
who enjoys a bit of “sausage and beans” of an evening? (Some consider the
gay jokes to be outright homophobic.) “It’s funny, ’cos I feel like in
England, we’re allowed to laugh about that a little bit more. When I read it
in the script I didn’t think nothing of it. I’ve got this English friend,
right, and this is his favourite joke: ‘Idris, you’re gay.’ Gay jokes are
just part of English culture in a way, right? And so I saw an extension of
that in this movie, I never saw it as homophobic or homoerotic.”
Then again, now that Elba hangs out with rappers such as P Diddy and Ludacris
and spends much of his time in Atlanta – where he owns a house and
lives close to his former wife and six-year-old daughter – it’s perhaps
not surprising that he’s not tuned in to the sensitivities of gay
moviegoers. He’s also probably a bit distracted by his own
über-heterosexuality: according to Essence magazine, he’s one of
the “ten hottest men” on the planet.
I ask if he has a girlfriend. “For a long time, I’ve been very private with my
life, but I’ve just realised, you know what, who cares?” he says. “So yeah,
I’m dating. I’m not in a full-time relationship, and I like that. I’ve done
it all, y’know, been married, all that s***. I honestly think that marriage
is outdated. I think people need to get married because they’re in love, not
because it’s the “right” thing to do. I got married at 25 and was divorced
by 29. You’re coerced by society, by family . . . by your religion.”
In spite of Elba’s newfound openness, he declines to tell me any further
details about his new female companion. Judging by his glances at our
waitress, however, I can’t help but wonder how long that’ll last. “I should
date that girl who interviewed me in New York,” he says, turning to
hismanager. “What was her name again?”As it happens, I have the print-out of
the article in front of me: the interviewer’s name was Celia Walden. “That’s
her,” he says. “She’s gorgeous.” I tell him there’s only one small problem
with Ms Walden: she’s dating Piers Morgan. Elba gives me a horrified look.
And then he confirms what I suspected all along: that when he left England
behind along with all those dud Ford Fiestas, he did so without ever looking
back.
“Piers Morgan?” he says. “Who’s that?”
RocknRolla is released nationwide on Sept 5 2008
