How a young Idris Elba almost scammed his way to Robert De Niro in the ’90s: “I got kicked out”
One common theme that you discover when you write about film stars a lot is that, unlike the rest of us who were falling out of pubs and shoving ourselves into sweaty gigs as teenagers, they were already incredibly focused on what they wanted to do for a career, rather like Idris Elba.
It’s hard to know where that kind of ambition and understanding of forging a path through life comes from; sometimes it’s from having parents already in the industry, other times it’s through sheer force of will, and in Elba’s case, it seems like it was the latter that set him on the way to becoming one of Britain’s most successful acting exports in history.
About as far removed from a nepo baby as it’s possible to be, Elba grew up in London as the only child of African immigrant parents, his dad working in the Ford plant in Dagenham, and discovered acting at school before winning a scholarship to the National Youth Music Theatre. But he didn’t actually manage to get paid acting roles for quite some time, relying on odd jobs and DJ’ing to pay the bills, and he was 23 before he got his first credited role on the BBC’s comedy Absolutely Fabulous in 1995.
Even before then, he had done his best to push himself into the industry, and on one occasion, almost made it into the upper echelons of Hollywood at the first time of asking.
He told Digital Spy, “When I was just starting out in this business, I was 19 years old, I scammed my way up to Robert De Niro’s office in Tribeca. And that’s how I ended up in [1993 mob movie] A Bronx Tale. No, I’m lying. I wasn’t in A Bronx Tale. I got kicked out of the office by Robert De Niro’s producing partner at the time, a gesture that I took to mean, ‘Kid, you’re going to go places’.”
While Elba didn’t specify why he was in New York in the first place, had he managed to get an audience with De Niro, you wouldn’t have put it past him to make an impact. A Bronx Tale was the first movie that De Niro directed, and it is the story of a young boy who encounters a mafia boss, leaving him torn between his straight-laced, hard-working father and the glamorous ill-gotten gains of a life working for the mob.
It wasn’t a huge hit on release, but it fared very well with critics, with Chazz Palminteri singled out for his performance in the movie, which was based on a one-man play he wrote and performed in the late 1980s. While De Niro was, of course, an established great, Elba would have to wait some time to get his recognition, which was accelerated by his decision to move to New York in the late 1990s.
After landing a small part on Law and Order in 2001, he was cast in the Baltimore-set HBO drama The Wire as Stringer Bell, which proved to be the launchpad he so desperately wanted, and he has since had huge success on both sides of the Atlantic, winning a host of awards, including a Golden Globe for his detective series Luther, and a Screen Actors Guild award for the 2015 movie Beasts of No Nation.
Elba is currently filming more Luther for Netflix, plus a third helping of the Chris Hemsworth action thriller Extraction.
