Idris Elba Quotes
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I've always had ambition, and the acting was successful and put my name on the map, but it was never the plan to stop there.
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I was cast in 'Thor' and I'm cast as a Nordic god. If you know anything about the Nords, they don't look like me but there you go. I think that's a sign of the times for the future. I think we will see multi-level casting. I think we will see that, and I think that's good.
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I'm a little sheepish about it. Whenever I meet fans and they're like, 'Oh, you're so sexy,' I just don't get that. There's no way one man can be universally sexy.
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I was always a real athletic kid. Then when I got older, I just figured it was part of life to keep training.
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Twenty or 30 years from now, I'm going to be on a beach in Jamaica.
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Every single film I've done, it's about the character.
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I did a rendition of 'Billie Jean' which is on my Soundcloud. I put it on Twitter, and it got about 3000 hits that day.
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I want to go to Sierra Leone with something - whether it's some sort of contribution to healthcare, or to the entertainment industry. My cousin is a nurse; we are talking about opening a clinic.
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In some countries, no one knows who Idris Elba is.
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There's the argument that you can relate to someone who's completely unrelatable. In the way that a director shows you his imagination on a film, then I get to show you my imagination in a big dumb character.
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There's a fast-track if you can do the networking. For some personalities it works, but for mine it doesn't.
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I did green screen for the first time! I wouldn't like to do a whole movie of green screen, though. You kind of forget the plot a little - like being in a Broadway play and doing it over and over and forgetting your line halfway through.
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When I look at my body of work, I've played a lot of characters who are morally conflicted - 'I'm right, no I'm wrong, I don't know what to do!' I want to play more characters who don't care as much, and who aren't as measured. They are what they are, no apologies.
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I tend to stay away from the comics.
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The less I talk about being black, the better.
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I don't get recognised that much yet in London, but when I do I get a real sense of achievement.
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It's actually quite criminal how 'The Wire' was systematically ignored.
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I'm rebelling against being handed a career, like, 'You're the next this; you're the next that.' I'm not the next anything, I'm the first me. I can't be myself, I can't just be Idris Elba. But that's just the nature of the business.
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What really excites me in a project is when it goes in a way you haven't been before.
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The only thing I change mainly is my sneakers. I love sneakers. But everything's sort of black or jeans. Jeans, always.
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Are there differences between black actors' opportunities and white actors' opportunities? Yes, there are. It's been said.
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The adrenaline feeling of jumping out of cliffs and bikes and all of that is very specific to the film. In 'Pac Rim' I'm not doing that so much. There isn't that touch stonework for me in it, but there is a lot of action.
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As an actor, you're trained to do the right thing, be politically correct, say your lines, say the right thing about the people you're working with.
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I think there's a tendency for actors like myself, and I don't mean to generalize myself, but I've played 'men's men,' if you will, characters that are simmering rage and calculated. There's a trend not to play anything that is opposed to that.