Post by Admin on Sept 9, 2015 17:46:47 GMT -4
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Neil Cross, creator of the hit BBC show “Luther,” starring Idris Elba, says a discomfiting thing happens whenever he socializes with his leading man.
“Being a middle-aged man in a room with Idris Elba,” Mr. Cross said by phone, “is the closest thing you can imagine to being invisible.”
The same thing happens, he added, when Mr. Elba is on screen. Whether playing Luther, which won him a Golden Globe, or Stringer Bell, his breakout role in the old HBO series “The Wire,” Mr. Elba tends to become the center of gravity, pulling all eyes his way. It even happened during a playful promo Mr. Elba recently shot with his “Star Trek Beyond” co-star Chris Pine, a man rarely described as hard on the eyes.
“Chris Pine is an attractive guy,” one commenter wrote, “But he looks like a block of uncooked tofu next to Idris Elba.”
It has been more than a decade since American audiences were introduced to Mr. Elba by way of “The Wire.” In the ensuing years, Mr. Elba, a 43-year-old Londoner, has played roles that are wildly, almost frenetically, all over the map. He’s been a superhero, a variety of villains, a stalker, a stalkee; he’s played Nelson Mandela; and he has appeared in a Tyler Perry movie as well as a musical dramedy with Chris Brown.
Even in the clunkers, Mr. Elba managed to rise above criticism, phoenixlike. In an otherwise damning review of “This Christmas” — the musical dramedy — one critic singled out Mr. Elba, likening his “sulky, sexy energy” to that of Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen. His admirers, who long for him to become the first black James Bond, are similarly ardent, recently rushing en masse to his defense when the author of a new Bond novel dismissed Mr. Elba as “too street” for the role. Indeed, the diss, for which the author later apologized, only intensified the clamor.
Now, Mr. Elba’s name is entering Oscar chatter, again — the same happened with “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” (2013), but the film left critics lukewarm — with a starring role as a warlord in “Beasts of No Nation.” Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, who won an Emmy for directing the first season of HBO’s “True Detective,” the film is being primed as awards bait. Netflix, the film’s distributor, plans to open it theatrically Oct. 16 and stream it the same day, making “Beasts” a high-profile experiment, and a few theater chains have boycotted the film in response. By Mr. Elba’s reckoning, this is his darkest, rawest role yet.
