“Fuck him, then”: The moment Idris Elba clashed with the prestige of Denzel Washington
After taking a little while to achieve superstardom, Idris Elba has more than made up for lost time, managing to translate his success on The Wire to one of the most impressive big-screen careers of any British actor of the last few decades.
The quality of his movies often leaves a lot to be desired (looking at you, Cats), but he routinely finds himself sharing the screen with some of the biggest names working today.
In 2007, the knight of the realm appeared in Ridley Scott’s crime drama American Gangster about the life and times of Frank Lucas, an African-American drug baron who used planes returning from Vietnam to import heroin into the United States.
Denzel Washington starred as Lucas, and Russell Crowe played the law enforcement agent trying to bring him down, while Elba was part of an all-star supporting cast also including Josh Brolin, Carla Gugino, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Cuba Gooding Jr.
Speaking to Pyro Radio, the original quotation on the website is a jumbled mess of poor punctuation and grammatical errors, so I’ve taken the liberty of tidying it up. Elba revealed what it was like working with some of his acting heroes. While he didn’t spend a lot of time with Crowe, he did share some key scenes with Washington, who he described as “intense” and as someone who took the movie very seriously, too seriously in some cases.
“He didn’t show up to the set, his character showed up to the set,” Elba recalled, “There’s no conversation or friendly banter because his character and my character had proper beef. I remember filming one of the scenes. I said hello to Denzel, and he kinda dissed me, and later I realised he was in character, but it pissed me off. I felt to myself, ‘Fuck him, then’, and that came across in the film.”
Elba’s character, Tango, owes Lucas some money after reneging on a deal, but instead of talking things over like civilised businessmen, the latter takes the rather unorthodox approach of shooting Tango right in the head in front of dozens of witnesses. If this had happened in the modern age, he’d have probably made a LinkedIn post about it, and considering that Washington had been so abrasive towards him earlier, it’s no wonder Elba worried that he might shoot him for real during this scene.
Washington has never been a traditional method actor, completely losing himself in his roles to the point where he gets on people’s nerves, and rather prefers to slowly let the performance envelop him, sitting in the character to get to know the intricacies of his new persona. This is a much more effective technique than just pretending to be someone else the entire time, as it allows for a more disciplined control over the performance.
While he might not be a method actor on the same level as Marlon Brando or Jared Leto, Washington clearly lets his character get the better of him sometimes, as Elba found out; at least he only got a bit of a bollocking, instead of a real bullet to the face.
