A biography for Idris Elbahasn’t been written yet.
“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.”