Idris Elba Quotes
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I lived in America for a long time before I started working as an actor. Some actors show up on set and have never done an American accent before, so they rely on a slew of technical mechanisms. Part of what makes an accent is understanding why people speak that way - you have to understand the culture.
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I've never had to explain 'Prometheus' to people, ever. Most people get it.
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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 less I talk about being black, the better.
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It's actually quite criminal how 'The Wire' was systematically ignored.
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People expect me to be that guy. But I'm more east London boy than east Baltimore.
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I don't have a place that I call home at the moment because there's no point. I mean, I'm a traveling circus for a while. It's weird. Like, if I wanted to go home, there's nowhere to go. I just go to a hotel. But I've kind of gotten used to it.
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If you go to Africa and you're white, you're probably not going to get that much work either. But the fact is that there is a longer history of black integration in the U.S. I don't have any resentment about this: I did the maths, calculated it against my ambition and decided to leave England.
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Now there are certain things you have to prepare - like dialect and special skills. But in the moment, interaction between two characters on the page doesn't need - for me, I don't need to prepare that.
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I love bikes. I used to own one, but I fell off it when I was younger and that was the end of my bike riding days until now.
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It was deeply important for me to understand where Mandela came from. Because we know where he was going, and that's a famous story, but who was he? Where did he come from? What was his upbringing?
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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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I'm an ambitious person. I never consider myself in competition with anyone, and I'm not saying that from an arrogant standpoint, it's just that my journey started so, so long ago, and I'm still on it and I won't stand still.
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It's really funny because the same people who loved me as Stringer Bell were the same people that were watching 'Daddy's Little Girls' literally in tears.
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I wasn't bad at school, but I was never a bookworm.
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Africans, we hold on to our youths and whip them into shape.
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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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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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The English are good at bad guys - the James Bond-style villain, cunning, slow-burning. The Americans are much more obvious about it.
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Every single film I've done, it's about the character.
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Every leading lady I work with, I'll see if I can get a song out of them and put it on an album.
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I would never be fearful of any character.
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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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I try to fit in workouts whenever I can.