Idris Elba on ‘Beasts of No Nation’ and Making Grown Men Cry
The first time you see Idris Elba in the child-soldier drama Beasts of No Nation, he’s emerging out of the jungle brush, cutting through the middle of an army of tiny, machete-and-machine-gun-wielding tweens. Clad in a beret and an outfit that might be characterized as “military dictator summer-casual,” he strides up to the young boy at the center of this crowd and asks “Who brought this thing here?” in a booming voice. It’s a proper movie entrance, bold and brash, immediately establishing the man known only as “Commandant” as a charismatic, Colonel Kurtz-like figure. He oozes danger and power. You fear this person immediately.
The first time you meet Idris Elba when you interview him, he’s standing right behind you, having silently walking through the door and feeling no need to announce his presence just yet. You have no idea the 42-year-old actor is even there until he clasps a hand on your shoulder with a friendly “Hey there, mate,” and scans the place for a way to sneak a smoke. Clad in a buttoned-to-the-top Fred Perry polo shirt and a get-up that says, “I’m just going out to meet some folks for drinks, though I may be DJ-ing at the club later as well,” the actor displays both a vintage, Steve McQueen-type coolness and the easy excitability of one of his younger co-stars. (Elba will rarely sit for the next 30 minutes, preferring to walk around the room or act out whatever anecdotes he’s telling.) He puts you at ease within nanoseconds. And you realize, beyond a shadow of a doubt, why this gentleman deserves to be a genuine movie star.
Part patriarchal surrogate, part power-hungry psychopath and part warped casualty of life during perpetual wartime, Elba’s Commandant is the figure who leads Beasts‘ displaced young hero Agu (played by newcomer Abraham Attah) deep into the heart of darkness. Grooming the youngster to be a child soldier through desensitization, terror and fatherly affection, the character is a complicated mix of good, bad and ugly — something the actor has demonstrated a facility with in his best-known roles on The Wire and the hit BBC import Luther, just not quite to this extent. “There’s a lot of real estate in the film to hate somebody,” he says. “But anyone can play mustache-twiddling evil, you know? It’s tougher to play someone like this as a human being. Because then you can’t just dismiss that person. You have to confront him.”
Several weeks before Netflix simultaneously releases it in theaters and on its streaming service on October 16th, Elba sat down (sort of) with Rolling Stone to talk about the experience of inhabiting this character’s mindset, being sized up by a posse of prepubescents and why grown men cry when “Stringer” talks in a British accent.