The movie that ripped Idris Elba’s heart out: “This is torture, man”
The nature of being an actor is that within a matter of seeming moments, a given performer can be playing a starkly different character, and perhaps sometimes it’s challenging to get out of the head of one person and into another living in a completely different time or place. This was an experience that certainly occurred in Idris Elba.
Over the years, Elba has played a wide variety of characters. We’ve seen him as a Baltimore drug boss in The Wire, as a no-nonsense detective in Luther, as well as further broad appearances in the likes of Prometheus, The Harder They Fall, and Sonic the Hedgehog, so there’s undoubtedly a versatility about the London-born actor.
And that’s all too clear, considering two of Elba’s best-known roles, just how adaptable he can be to a given role. Within a short space of time, Elba had to portray both Nelson Mandela in the 2013 biographical film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, directed by Justin Chadwick, and Heimdall in the second Thor movie by Marvel.
Naturally, though, this threw up its own set of personal challenges for the actor and in an interview with The Telegraph, he explained that he found it difficult to escape from the mind of Mandela and get back into superhero mode. “I mean, I didn’t quite shake it off,” Elba said. “It was really weird. I’d just done eight months in South Africa. I came to England, and the day I came back, I had to do reshoots on Thor 2.”
The actor continued, “I was like, ‘This is torture, man. I don’t want to do this.’ My agent said: ‘You have to, it’s part of the deal.'”
The scene in question saw Elba’s character falling from a spaceship, so he had to be strapped into a harness for a green screen, which was a far cry from what he’d experienced just weeks before as one of the most significant historical figures of all time.
“I’m thinking: ’24 hours ago, I was Mandela’. When I walked into the set, the extras called me Madiba,” Elba went on to explain. “I was literally walking in this man’s boots. [Within] six months, the crew, we were all so in love with this film we had made. I was him. I was Mandela, practically. Then there I was, in this stupid harness, with this wig and this sword and these contact lenses. It ripped my heart out.”
