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Idris Elba interview: Marvel movies are 'torture'
Idris Elba on how Nelson Mandela inspired him to record an album, annoying fans, and his secret role in the Avengers sequel, Age of Ultron
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It’s the morning after the night before. To be more precise, it’s the afternoon after the morning before. Idris Elba began his DJ set around 3am; the party, it seems, didn’t end until sometime around dawn. So it’s teatime before the actor shuffles into a quietened, darkened room at Pikes Hotel, wearing just a pair of shorts, flip-flops and a hand-rolled smoke.
Yesterday, Elba was sequestered outside London, on the hush-hush set of a huge fantasy movie he’s not supposed to talk about. It was a long way, in every sense, from the role with which he began 2014, playing the lead in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.
But today The Wire star turned established star of blockbusters films (Prometheus, Pacific Rim, Thor) is flopping in this famous White Island establishment. The Seventies/Eighties rock ’n’ roll jet set partied at Pikes; the video for Club Tropicana by Wham! was shot here. The hillside hotel offers secret cubbyholes aplenty in which to recover from a wee hours slot “spinning” dance music from your laptop.
Last night’s session was the fourth of nine Saturday night/Sunday morning events the east Londoner is hosting across the summer season for gig/clubbing brand Ibiza Rocks.
“The idea is to make it more of a living-room sort of thing – a house party,” he says of his decision to play Ibiza Rocks. Even though the guest-list last night stretched to a whopping 1,000 people – and even considering his still somewhat unproven DJ credentials – Elba could easily have parlayed his celebrity status into playing one of the big-ticket, big-fee Ibizan superclubs. But the likes of Space, Amnesia and Ushuaia are not for him.
“It’s designed to be small,” he says of his gig in one of the mazelike intimate back rooms. “The dance floor’s not very big. If you like the music, you dance. If you don’t, you can mill around, and still get part of the atmosphere.” Or you can stand and gawp at the famous-face DJ, as not a few punters had done last night. The informal nature of Pikes meant his DJ booth was on the floor, within a few feet of the tourists who’d clearly come to drink in the eye-candy.
“It’s definitely distracting,” admits the 42 year-old, who spent his childhood helping out on his uncle’s east London mobile disco.
“Especially when people want to shake your hand, take your picture,” he grumbles. “I’m working! I’m trying to put these beats together.” But such is Elba’s life these days. A local boy, made good. To paraphrase that old advert, the Hackney-born actor is one of ours who’s done rather well over there. Yet, while he may have leading-man gravitas, he also seems curiously approachable. In part it’s because, for all the cult acclaim belatedly afforded The Wire, and for all his Hollywood films, to many people he’s best known as the charismatic lead in the BBC’s cop series, Luther.
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Leading man: Elba as Luther Photo: BBC
This seems the best explanation for the preponderance of middle-aged women checking out his DJ set – not, perhaps, quite the audience he had in mind for a bunch of “dirty London” and progressive house tunes.
The name of his Ibiza Rocks night is 7wallace. That was originally part of a London address at which Elba stayed during the filming of Luther. It then became the de facto name of the house parties he held while in residence.
In turn, 7wallace became a signature Idris beverage: Tanqueray gin, splash of cranberry and tonic, “and loads of lime. It should be a nice shade of pink. It’s quite a refreshing drink.” Too refreshing: Elba orders us two flagons of the stuff, and promptly finishes mine.
But 7wallace’s life doesn’t end in Ibiza. It’s also the name of a planned record label. “What will eventually happen is an extension of [my] being a DJ – I’d like to be able to represent other DJs and artists on 7wallace, taking again the same sort of vibe.” A hard taskmaster, Elba picks over last night’s set. “It was a bit unfocused and I didn’t have time to prepare. All the songs were really new songs, and the mixes were a little bit unfocused. The audience might not have been aware, but I was. It was an atmosphere thing.”
But anyway, onwards. Elba’s girlfriend and infant son Winston are here with him (he also has an 11-year-old daughter from a previous relationship). So the mostly-US based but largely itinerant family are taking in some R & R while in Ibiza. But sometime in the coming week, Elba might be back in the UK, working on the independent film A Hundred Streets. He’s starring in, and he’s co-producing, the portmanteau of “seven stories, set in one square mile of London”.
Is it true he’s “circling” Guy Ritchie’s mooted remake of King Arthur?
“Rumour,” Elba says, his bassy, gravelly voice even lower in his chest than normal due to the fact that he’s flopped out horizontally on a couch.
“Massive rumour, from out of nowhere.” But, for sure, he would like to work again with the “amazing” Ritchie, who directed him in 2008’s RocknRolla.
And then he admits that he is in fact reading the script.
Another mooted project is Bastille Day. He says that Paris-set thriller, in which he would play a CIA agent, is not confirmed but is “on the cards” (although at the time of writing Elba was due to commence filming).
“It is a hybrid,” he nods slowly, referring to the mixed-bag nature of his current professional commitments. He says it heavily, but actually he likes it that way.
“Ironically, yesterday I had to…” Elba chuckles. He’s not meant to talk about this, but he clearly enjoys doing things he’s not meant to do. “I’m in Avengers,” he reveals. He means that his Thor character, deity-cum-sentry Heimdall, appears in Age of Ultron, the second instalment of the superhero ensemble franchise. “And I’m doing a scene with Chris Hemsworth [who plays Thor] and Tom Hiddleston [Loki], and they’re like, [whispers] – ‘Aren’t you [meant to be] in Ibiza?’ ” That bassy chuckle again, followed by a frown. Elba came straight to Ibiza party-time from a mythical Norse god/Marvel universe that has made billions at the global box office. His head is all over the place. “That’s why I was p----- about my set yesterday. I really just wasn’t there. I was annoyed.”
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Mythical stars: Chris Hemsworth (left) and Elba in Thor
But this is only the start of Idris Elba’s musical adventures. For the last 18 months or so, he’s been working on his first album. Titled Mi Mandela, the album is a collection of songs inspired by Elba’s experiences studying and playing the late South African lawyer, freedom fighter, campaigner and politician. Elba doesn’t sing or rap on it; nor, it seems does he play any instruments. Rather he has produced the 11-track project, in collaboration with a group of British and South African musicians, singers and studio engineers. Elba calls it a “character album”.
He explains how he travelled to South Africa last September. He took with him Ben Hudson, who has released records and collaborated with Kanye West under the name Mr Hudson. Also accompanying Elba was Irish singer/rapper Maverick Sabre. In his back pocket, as it were, Elba had an unreleased song by Mumford & Sons called Home; the actor got to know the band after directing and starring in a video for their 2012 single Lover of the Light.
His team spent four and a half weeks in Johannesburg, working with local talents such as Phuzekhemisi (“he’s a guitarist; in Zulu he’s like Eric Clapton”). He’s the vocalist on Thank You for Freedom, a soaring, African-blues tribute to the man South Africans call Madiba.
Another song, the sweet, lilting Hold On, features vocals from hotly-tipped young British artist George the Poet. It began as a “jam session, me, Ben and Mav, just p------ about, coming up with stuff. And we had a conversation [about] when I spent a night in Robben Island, as an experiment to just understand what it was like to be there. When I think about it in hindsight, oh,” Elba shudders, “it makes my skin crawl.” As part of his thorough preparation to play Mandela, Elba dug into as many aspects of his life as possible. Of course, 27 years in prison were never going to be easy to convey in a film. But in the face of the protests of the custodians of Robben Island – now a shrine and monument to the lives destroyed there in the struggle against apartheid – Elba spent a night there alone, in a cell.
“It was about perspective. He was there for so long, that one room, sleeping there for so long – I had to do one night. And when I think about how my performance came together, it was a lot to do with how I reacted to that one night. Being in that s---hole [where he was] fighting for his liberty. It really just laid the foundation for my performance.” Still, he acknowledges it was a tall order.
“How do you bring the spirit of a man like that on to film?” he asks rhetorically. “As an actor, you can’t wing him! You’re either him or you’re not. And because I had the challenge of not looking anything like him, and not being South African, and being this…” He stops.
“I’m no freedom fighter. I’m Idris, a lad from east London, that just happens to be doing acting and doing well. I didn’t feel qualified to play him at all.” So while the release of the film has been and gone, Elba felt he needed to further amplify his “qualifications” for the job by assembling, or curating, this tribute album.
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Lonely struggle: Elba as Nelson Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
“It’s character music – it’s an extension of what I do as an actor. It’s musically explaining to the listener what my character was going through.” It’s a bold undertaking. It might even appear hubristic, especially if we misunderstand the album’s title. It may be pronounced “me Mandela”, but Elba is at pains to point out that he’s not saying “I am Mandela”. With a family background in Sierra Leone (and Ghana), he explains that his parents spoke Creole, and in that “broken English”, “mi” means “us”. So it’s “our Mandela”. You can’t fault Idris Elba’s seriousness. He paid for the entire project – he only signed a record deal in the last few weeks. Plus, he undertook the trip only four weeks after his father died. Having in part based his portrayal of Mandela on Winston Elba, he had to see the project through.
Did it take him a while to shake off Mandela?
“Mmm. Yeah. I mean, I didn’t quite shake it off.” It seems he didn’t have the chance. “It was really weird,” he begins. “I’d just done eight months in South Africa. I came to England and the day I came back I had to do reshoots on Thor 2.” He raises an eyebrow. “And in the actual scene my hair was different, my…” He stops and gives an exasperated sigh. “I was like, ‘This is torture, man. I don’t want to do this.’ My agent said: ‘You have to, it’s part of the deal.’ ”
In the scene in question in the superhero movie, “I’m actually falling down from a spaceship, so they had to put me in harness in this green-screen studio. And in between takes I was stuck there, fake hair stuck on to my head with glue, this f------ helmet, while they reset. And I’m thinking: ‘24 hours ago, I was Mandela’. When I walked into the set the extras called me Madiba. I was literally walking in this man’s boots. [Within] six months, the crew, we were all so in love with this film we had made. I was him. I was Mandela, practically,” he insists.
“Then there I was, in this stupid harness, with this wig and this sword and these contact lenses. It ripped my heart out.”
So Mi Mandela seems to be Elba’s attempt to both further honour a hero and icon whom he rightly worships, and to atone for the big-pay-packet commercial work he undertakes. As he says at one point, his approach to choosing films is “two for them, one for you”. For every two movies he makes to increase his profile and/or bank balance, he undertakes one that is more personal, more meaningful. Into the latter category falls Beasts of No Nation. A film about child soldiers, Elba shot in Ghana with director Cary Fukunaga (Jane Eyre, HBO’s True Detective). He plays a warlord. “I’m not quite Charles Taylor. I’m not quite Kony. I’m somewhere in between.” That film, which he calls BONN, will inspire his next character album. It will be a hip-hop record, albeit recorded with vocals by kids. “I don’t want anyone whose voice has broken.” They will represent the child soldiers. “So it’s a character album, but [this time] not my character.”
Elba is a man brimming with both ideas and confidence. He’s not afraid to flex either. It makes for charismatic onscreen performances. As much can be seen again in cinemas this month, in the American thriller No Good Deed, in which he plays the (very) bad guy. And it explains his inspired casting as the voice of Shere Khan in Disney’s Jungle Book remake.
All things considered, Elba is the big cat that got the cream, and he’s loving every minute. “I’m a very popular actor,” he says boldly. “I’m not famous, I’m popular. And that popularity is at a feverish pitch at the moment. And I’m definitely aware of it, and I’m taking advantage of the opportunities.
“Launching as a DJ and a producer could go really wrong for me, because I’m actually at a very high point as an actor.” Twenty years after starting out in the foothills of British acting – a bit part in Absolutely Fabulous here, two different roles in The Bill there – “suddenly my name means something on an international market place”.
Elba can imagine the comments. “But what is he doing? Oh, he’s in Ibiza, DJing. Oh, he’s made a record,” he says self-mockingly. “Is he rapping? Is he singing?” He shrugs and sniffs and thoughtfully rubs his naked belly. “To anyone that’s really not focused on what I’m doing, it might look like I’m making the biggest mistake of my life.” The thought doesn’t seem to bother him.
‘Idris Elba presents mi Mandela’ (Parlophone) is released on November 24; ‘No Good Deed’ is in cinemas on November 22