The Idris Experience

From prestige TV to tentpole franchises to the Coachella DJ tent, the British actor is a poster boy for 21st-century fame: multidisciplinary, omnipresent, engaging. K. Austin Collins tracks down the international man of (maybe) mystery to consider what we want from Idris Elba, and how he delivers

- K. Austin Collins

He’s smooth— obviously. And tall.

An hour into meeting him, I can’t help but continue to notice as much. We are deep into a conversation about growing up black and British in the ’80s and wanting to be a movie star: what that must have felt like to young Idrissa Akuna Elba, the first-generation working-class son of Ghanaian and Sierra Leonean immigrants, who’d grown up in Hackney and East London’s Canning Town, areas where the far-right National Front party had strongholds. It’s a complicated history. “Needless to say,” he tells me, “if you were black and living in Canning Town, you were probably subject to racial abuse and getting chased down the street by people calling you a black coon.”

But he doesn’t dwell, preferring to tell a different story. At 13 he met a drama teacher, a Welsh woman named Miss McPhee, who sparked something in him. “I remember just being fascinated,” he says. “She’d be like, ‘So’”—he slips into a lively, declarative teacher voice—“ ‘I want you guys to pretend to be a frying egg. An egg in a frying pan. What would that feel like?’ ” He imitates his fellow classmates, all of them rowdy teenage boys, refusing to participate. And then he gives me a rendition of his performance: a fury of convulsions, his mouth serving up popping and sizzling sounds—splattering grease by way of Daffy Duck.

“‘You’re really good at that,’ ” he says, again channeling Miss McPhee. “‘Have you ever fried yourself?’ ”