Idris Elba

“If you go to Africa and you're white, you're probably not going to get that much work either. But the fact is that there is a longer history of black integration in the U.S. I don't have any resentment about this: I did the maths, calculated it against my ambition and decided to leave England.”

“Whether it's music or acting, that creativity all comes from the same source.”

“The less I talk about being black, the better.”

“Twenty or 30 years from now, I'm going to be on a beach in Jamaica.”

“I knew that if I wanted to be all I could be, I would have to go to the U.S. It took three years to get the accent right.”

“I was really ambitious, so I was innovative. I was one of the first DJs to do live calls, 'cause I found this phone device that would pick up other people's voices.”

“I've always been DJing; it's just I'm making more of a push for it, making it more public.”

“I don't have a place that I call home at the moment because there's no point. I mean, I'm a traveling circus for a while. It's weird. Like, if I wanted to go home, there's nowhere to go. I just go to a hotel. But I've kind of gotten used to it.”

“In some countries, no one knows who Idris Elba is.”

“I'm rebelling against being handed a career, like, 'You're the next this; you're the next that.' I'm not the next anything, I'm the first me. I can't be myself, I can't just be Idris Elba. But that's just the nature of the business.”

“There's the argument that you can relate to someone who's completely unrelatable. In the way that a director shows you his imagination on a film, then I get to show you my imagination in a big dumb character.”

“There's a fast-track if you can do the networking. For some personalities it works, but for mine it doesn't.”

“I'm tactile, very tactile. A woman who has really nice, looked-after skin is such a turn-on for me. It's always sexy.”

“I still sing on bits and pieces. Singing's something that I love to do, but it's not something that I pursue as a career.”

“It's really funny because the same people who loved me as Stringer Bell were the same people that were watching 'Daddy's Little Girls' literally in tears.”