A movie star looks in the mirror
THE first thing that strikes you, on being introduced to Idris Elba, is the scale of him. He’s enormous. He’s monumental. He’s widescreen. He’s epic. In 2017, Elba made a movie with Kate Winslet called The Mountain Between Us. He didn’t play the mountain, but I’d like to know why not; a fortune could have been saved on locations. Last year, Elba made a thriller called Beast, in which he punches a lion in the face. This seemed somewhat implausible to me until I encountered Elba in the flesh. Now I marvel at the lion’s ability to absorb the blow. Poor kitty.
Perhaps you’re thinking that you don’t have to meet Elba in person to appreciate his powerful physical effect. It has been clear for 20 years now, since he first broke through as Stringer Bell, the thinking person’s drug dealer, in The Wire, not only that here is a man who commands attention, an actor with rare charisma, a star — but that here is a big star. Huge. You get it.
Sorry, but no. You don’t get it. In fact, I had met Elba before, in passing, on a couple of occasions over the years, and still I was taken aback when I walked into the famous Abbey Road Studios, in London, on a Tuesday lunchtime last November, and clocked him through a window sitting at a tiny desk (on closer inspection it turned out to be normal-sized), tapping on a miniature keyboard (actually, standard-issue MacBook). As he corkscrewed upwards from his doll’s-house chair (regulation office furniture), I stepped back for a moment to take him in. He was wearing a faded black tracksuit that could do double-duty as a dance tent come festival season and unlaced Dr Martens boots. On his head was perched a child’s beanie. He beamed and disappeared my own, perfectly reasonably proportioned hand inside his enormous fist.
The only child of immigrants to the UK — his father was 33 when he arrived from his native Sierra Leone; his mother, born in Ghana, was 26 — Idris Elba is one of a handful of British actors who can justly claim to be Hollywood leading men. His story is well known: the boy from the east-London council estate who, in the 1990s, followed his dream of being an actor to New York, made his name with that extraordinarily controlled and seductive performance in what remains one of the finest TV dramas ever made, and went on to big-screen success and cultural ubiquity — as an actor, director, producer, DJ, musician, rapper, entrepreneur, fashion designer, philanthropist, dare-devil, podcaster, heart-throb, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few. A father of two — daughter Isan, son Winston — he got married for the third time in 2019, to Sabrina, a Canadia
