‘I’m a hugger’

Idris Elba is renowned for playing tough guys – but he’s happy to show his cuddly side.

There’s a sudden quickening in the atmosphere of the hotel lobby when he arrives, tall and striding, surrounded by enough people to form a modest entourage, and soon after I’m in a small room with him and he’s apologising for feeling unwell.

Seeing as it’s Idris Elba (who elicited even more excitement in my circles than the last benchmark of George Clooney; he was recently voted the sexiest man alive), let’s just say he’s suffering from man-ly flu. Despite the intermittent punctuation of sneezes, coughs and some vigorous nose blowing, he keeps going without complaint.

His London manor voice, with the cold, is even deeper than usual – slow and extended like molasses laced with gravel. Sometimes, he draws out certain words with a snake-like sibilance: “angstsssss”, “ambitionssss”. He’s casually dressed, but well put together, in jeans, T-shirt and a dark bomber jacket.

We’re here to talk about the return – hurrah! – of Luther, series five. It struck me, rewatching the four series, that DCI John Luther has become a lot less angry over the years. In the first series in 2010, he’s always smashing walls with his bare fists and bashing doors down… “That’s, you know, growing. Yeah, anger management,” he says.

Has anger ever been an issue for him in real life? “No, not really. Everyone’s got a temper, though.” What does he do when he gets pent up? Any meditation or deep-breathing tips? “No, I don’t have any – I’d love to know some.”

Luther always has his hands deep in his coat pockets and bounds, bowlegged, through the grimy streets of London. Elba doesn’t know where he got his Luther walk from. “It’s what the coat [a big tweed overcoat now famous in its own right] makes me do, I think,” he says. “There’s lots of walking in Luther and it just seems that he gets to where he needs to get to very quickly. His father was in the Army and there’s a sort of march; it’s not in the storyline but it’s in his DNA.”

He finished filming the new series in March and says that he finds the character hard to shake off. There are times when the progamme is so terrifying, there’s a hiding-behind-your-cushion level of tension. Do the technicalities of filming mean Elba never actually gets frightened himself? “Not frightened but disturbed,” he says. “There are lots of really horrible ways to murder in Luther. Typically, the viewer comes with John whenever he walks into a murder scene. The audience sees what John sees. What that means is that I see what the murder rooms are like. If someone has had their throats slit, there’ll be lots of blood and a knife. As much as it’s makebelieve, the make-up is designed to look realistic and for me, I take that stuff home. “The last season, there were some horrific murders and the director said, ‘I don’t want to show you it until we do it.’ I agreed and then I walked in… It was so horrible to see. Neil Cross is an amazing writer because he takes you deeper and really imagines the most visceral, heinous and compelling way to take an audience on a journey – and sometimes you do root for the bad guy, which is weird.”

Talking of bad guys – spoiler alert for those on catch-up – we left Luther last series with the news that his psychopathic would-be girlfriend Alice (played with piquant aplomb by Ruth Wilson) was categorically dead. But she appears right at the end of the trailer for the new series and has played so many tricks on him before… So, she’s alive isn’t she? “Is that a question? You know I’m not allowed to say – you’re going to have to watch it.” Total poker face.

Come on, she must still be alive? “OK…” He admits on further questioning. “We are upping the stakes for John Luther this series. Alice is back and there is unfinished business.”

The ambition is still there for Luther to make it to the big screen – “With Luther as a film, the scale is bigger – the crime is bigger, the bad guys are bigger, Luther is bigger and there’s a more international lens put on it. It’s filmed in London now because that’s where we are, but if we do a movie version, it can be – ‘Right, then he went to Brazil’ – and you can be in the favelas because it’s on this larger scale.”

Hmmm, Sao Paulo – isn’t that where Alice wanted to take John? “Yeah, you remember that…” Wry grin. “It could be a storyline like that.”

Suddenly, the piercing scream of a Tannoy cuts through the hotel room and a woman’s voice announces that a fire drill is about to start. Elba: “You couldn’t write this, could you?” Especially as you’re not feeling well. An affable laugh: “One of those days…”

He tells me that he definitely feels his age. It was a really early start for him today and his travelling schedule at the moment is extreme. In the past few months he’s been to Dubai (where he DJs, as well as in Ibiza), New York, San Francisco, and Thailand among other countries in Asia. But, for him, there’s no place like home and for the past seven years – after living in the States for 16 – that is most definitely London: “I like being home. My mum’s here.”

Although for Christmas this year, while he’ll be spending it with his family, they’re planning to go abroad. “We want to go somewhere warm, so it will feel untraditional without the cold. New Year? No plans yet. I like to chill and not party too hard. Then back to work on 2 January.”

He has a four-year-old son by make-up artist Naiyana Garth, called Winston after his late father, and a 16-year-old daughter called Isan (her name is tattooed on his arm) with another make-up artist, Hanne Norgaard.

Now he’s engaged to former beauty queen, model and actress Sabrina Dhowre – 29 to his 46 years. They met when he was filming The Mountain between Us in Canada. When I ask about her, Elba nips the question smartly in the bud, simply saying: “I am uncomfortable talking about her.”

Back to work then… 2018 has been busy. In March, Sky showed his semi-autobiographical comedy, In the Long Run (which he created and stars in as his dad, renamed Walter; his family located on a council estate in Hackney, where he was brought up, named Idrissa Akuna Elba). And in August he made his his feature-film directorial debut with Yardie. As a writer, he says he feels free to create, unbound by concerns of modern sensitivities. There’s a sense in which he wishes people would toughen up and not take offence so easily. “There was a time when people could say offensive things to each other and didn’t get shot or stabbed and die. You know, it was slightly thicker-skinned.

“If you can deal with someone who’s just called you a name, handle it yourself, manage how that offends you or affects you and that’s the end of it, it doesn’t have to be the end of the world. You don’t have to write a six-page letter to the prime minister.”

He is committed to greater diversity in actors but also stories (he made a well-received speech about this in the House of Commons in 2016), and will be looking increasingly to Africa for TV and film projects for his production company, Green Door. He went to Ghana (his mother, Eve, is Ghanaian; Winston’s family was from Sierra Leone) to film Beasts of No Nation, in which he played a savage African warlord chief of a child army. “The film was hard, but Ghana was beautiful to be in,” he says. “I learnt about my heritage and because of my physique and melanin, I would have got on well in Africa and that was exactly what happened.

“I was plugged into the environment immediately. Getting to see my family, my aunts, it was so interesting and great to see where I’d come from just a generation before. I love Africa and I want to see more, and different, stories from there.”

I wonder how he approaches his roles; his most notable still being Luther and Stringer Bell, the drug dealer with real-estate ambitions in The Wire. I imagine Elba as more instinctive than a method actor? “Method isn’t always necessary. It’s called acting for a reason, you know…”

But when he played Nelson Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom in 2013, he felt that it was important to stay the night by himself in a cell in Robben Island, “to everyone’s horror, really. It was necessary for me because I’ve never been to jail and I needed to understand that isolation so that when I said the words, I wasn’t saying them from imagining what it’s like to be in prison. I felt what it was like to be locked up and having my freedom taken away – OK, for just one night – but that was enough for me to be able to go, ‘Right, I can talk about what Mandela might have gone through.’” So what was it like in your cell? “It was horrible and scary. It was haunted. It was cold.” Huge sneeze. “Sorry. I don’t think a director should expect an actor to do that; it needs to be the choice of the actor.”

If he’s reserved about his private life, he’s even cagier about his politics. In fact, he believes that actors shouldn’t talk about politics, full stop. “Actors and entertainers have the right to say what they want, but I don’t want to be reading something about an actor, only to be railroaded with an opinion.”

He’s more outspoken when I ask him how he was affected by the Harvey Weinstein revelations and the subsequent fall-out. “It’s great that women spoke out in our industry but it’s also important to recognise that there are a lot less illustrious industries where this sort of thing goes on every single day. Women are going through this RIGHT NOW and are too scared or don’t have the outlets to speak to journalists about the horrible things that are happening to them, for fear of losing their jobs.”

I like to ask uber-masculine men what they consider to be the most feminine trait they possess: John Malkovich likes to embroider and Dennis Quaid to hoover… “I don’t know if crocheting or hoovering are feminine,” he says. “I grew up in a house where my mum taught me to do everything she could do, because I’m her only child. So I cooked, I hoovered, I made the beds, I ironed and I sewed.

“I’m a doting dad and I only say that’s more feminine than masculine because children and their mothers cuddle and all that, but I’m very affectionate with my loved ones and, generally, I’m a hugger.”

He looks quite miserable now with his cold, so a final question. Is he a feminist? “I believe in gender equality and I believe that you and I are no different. We’re humans. You happen to be female and I happen to be male and there shouldn’t be too many distinctions between us, really. I have a daughter and it’s important that she believes she can do whatever her daddy can do.”

Radio Times