“I’m hoping that my fan base as an actor isn’t mad at me, but eventually, I want to transfer to being a director fully,” Idris Elba declared this evening during a career Q&A session at the Red Sea Film Festival.
Elba passed through Jeddah for the career Q&A, but also to screen his new short film project, Dust To Dreams, as part of the festival. Elba directed the short, which was shot in Lagos, Nigeria, and stars Seal, Nse Ikpe-Etim, Eku Edewor, Atlanta Bridget Johnson, and Constance Olatunde.
“I’ve been acting for a long time. I still love it, but I think directing allows me to flex slightly different muscles, and, you know, be a part of the set in a different way. I really enjoy it,” Elba added during the Q&A session.
Elba spent a significant portion of his time during the session discussing his plans to direct, particularly on the African continent, and teased his forthcoming feature, This Is How It Goes, which he has directed for Apple. The film was shot in Ghana.
This Is How It Goes is based on Neil LaBute’s play of the same name. Elba starred in a 2005 West End production of the play alongside Ben Chaplin and Megan Dodds. He also stars in this feature adaptation, with Charlie Cox (Daredevil) and Wunmi Mosaku (Sinners) leading. The story follows an interracial couple who reconnect with an old school acquaintance and offer to take him in.
“The original is about a Black man married to a white woman, and a white man comes to move into their house, and it’s about what happens to their relationship,” Elba said of the story. “I bought the rights to the film and transposed the story. So it’s a white man married to a Black woman, and a Black man comes to live in their house. It’s an incredible examination of marriage, trust, and race.”
Elba added, “We start the movie at a wedding in Ghana, and I literally just finished last week. It was fantastic.”
Later during the session, Elba shared an interesting story about the struggles he faced landing substantiative roles early in his career, which he said led him to make a pact with his longtime agent to avoid roles where he depicts enslaved people and gangsters. However, every role that came across his desk, he said, was “this thug, this drug dealer, this guy stealing cars, wife beaters.”
“I didn’t want to do that,” he explained, adding that sometime in the late 90s, he was booked to audition for a film without seeing the script. That film was Steven Spielberg’s Amistad. Elba said his agent pitched the film as a story “about a boat that comes from Africa.”
“I didn’t get to read the script. I had to learn Mende, the language of Sierra Leone,” Elba said of the time. Elba’s mother is from Ghana. His father is Sierra Leonean. He said he told his mother about the film, and she informed him that the Amistad was indeed a very famous ship that brought enslaved Africans to the Americas.
“I auditioned with Chiwetel Ejiofor,” Elba said. “We were young, and I remember, I didn’t get the part because my heart fell out. I was like, I’m not doing this. They wanted us to get whipped on the ship and sign a clause about being naked. I said nah, I’m just gonna go and DJ.”
Elba said he spent years working as a DJ to support himself as a young actor in New York before landing what he described as his biggest role as Stringer Bell in HBO’s The Wire — a role which he joked was ironic, considering his rule about not playing gangsters.
Elba also took a lengthy series of audience questions during the Q&A session, during which an audience member asked him whether the rumors she’d heard about him being cast as the next James Bond are true.
“No, no, no,” he said with a strong chuckle.
Red Sea runs until Dec 13.
