Idris Elba has presence. It wasn't just his handsome glare that collected a following of "Stringabellas" for his role of Stringer Bell on HBO's "The Wire." It was his young-Sean-Connery manliness and dry-ice street smarts.
Even if you'd never seen "The Wire," you could tell Elba had a major star's aura from his opposite performances in two wildly different big-screen hits, "This Christmas" and " Obsessed." In "This Christmas," he was superbly, sometimes hilariously confrontational as a reckless jazz saxophonist; you could sense Elba's relief at letting loose after years of Stringer Bell's emotional deep freeze. In "Obsessed," he brought a mulish strength to a white-collar man caught in a "Fatal Attraction"-type plot. Paul Seydor, who edited both movies, says "Idris is an actor with extraordinary on-screen charisma."
His decision to bring his magnetic strength to properties like the comic-book espionage film, "The Losers," has won some skeptical advance coverage from a usually sheepish press, depicting him as a cynic plotting out his show-biz success story.
Elba doesn't see it that way. Stranded in England while doing promotion for the six-part BBC-drama "Luther," he says, "My motivation is to keep myself fresh. I consider myself an everyman – that's one of the gifts I've been given as a human being. I can be the vessel to portray all sorts of characters and turn into different types of people." He's soon to be seen not just in "The Losers" and "Luther," but in another action movie, "Takers." (He's also finishing up a major role in "Thor.") At the end of the month his low-budget psychological thriller, "Legacy," written and directed by Thomas Ikimi, premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival.
He's becoming a draw for mainstream American moviegoers, but most critics and audiences may not know his best work. He delivered a knock-out performance as a Hutu soldier in "Sometimes in April," Raoul Peck's devastating HBO film about the Rwandan genocide. He has always taken diverse parts in films and television. "I can change the way I look. I don't want to be pigeonholed: no actor does. I know there are some people who will only like me as Stringer Bell, but I have a career!"
He does concede, "It can get confusing for an audience" – especially if an actor like Elba follows one caper movie called "The Losers" with another called "Takers."
On "The Wire," he says, the acting was "very disciplined," building a gravity and depth that supported his story arc. On "The Losers," the challenge was "to play a larger-than-life character vividly and believably. It's a popcorn, have-fun type of thing, but you can't over-act in it, and you can't under-act in it."
One aspect of "The Losers" suits Elba just fine: it's a comic-book movie with a cast of grown-ups. Part of the set-up is that Elba's Roque and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Clay, best friends and virtuosi at covert ops, have been around the block and around the world so often they can read each other's characters in a twitch. (They're like graphic-novel versions of the scarred buddies in a Sam Peckinpah film like "The Killer Elite.")
Clay is the leader of their dirty half-dozen and Roque his right-hand man. There's a cartoon check and balance to their chemistry. Roque's ruthless focus on what the group needs for surivival is at odds with Clay's pursuit of a righteous esprit de corps.
"It's very easy to make a soldier a menacing guy, but I wanted you to believe his friendship with Clay and the other soldiers. He's the practical one of the bunch. He takes that center line. And for someone who's always been the second-in-command, it's a very human thing for there to be friction with the man on top."
Elba wields some heavy steel in the fight scenes. He trained intensely so he wouldn't have to cede his big moves to his stunt man. "What I love about being an actor is: I don't know everything, but I know a little something about everything. On ‘The Wire' I learned about how to sell narcotics and deceive the law." In his BBC show, "Luther," playing a homicide detective who is "simmering with rage," he "learned huge amounts about police procedures and how people are investigated when they commit a crime."
Recently, someone asked him, "Do you think Luther could arrest Stringer?" At first Elba thought that because both are so intelligent, "It would be a Mexican stand-off." But he decided, "I don't think anyone could have caught Stringer; the only way to catch a man like that is to kill him.