The role Idris Elba has always dreamed of playing: “I will be captivating!”
From his breakout role on The Wire to countless leading performances in films, TV shows, and even the odd video game, it’s fair to say that Idris Elba has pretty much completed the acting game, so where do you go once you’ve reached the top and exhausted every possible avenue in your chosen field? You make music, of course!
To be fair to the guy, he’s always had a passion for music, especially R&B and hip-hop, and you can find him on the opening track of Jay-Z’s American Gangster album, as well as on songs by Wiley, Skepta, and even Taylor Swift (sure, it’s on ‘London Boy’, one of her worst songs, but it still counts), and that’s not taking into account his solo ventures, which include a number of EPs, singles, and a full-length album inspired by the title character from the detective series Luther.
Speaking to the Evening Standard in 2014, Elba revealed a desire to combine his two greatest loves. “In future, I want to do a musical,” he announced, “I want to do things that challenge me. I’ve got a keen eye on music and would like to do something that marries my world of acting and music. I am not sure if I can sing very well, but I will be good, I promise! I will be captivating.”
Eventually, he did appear in a musical, and unfortunately for the entire planet, it was Tom Hooper’s Cats.
Released just a few months before the world was shut down by the pandemic (coincidence), the Les Misérables director took on the famously plotless Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, wherein Elba joined an all-star cast, including the aforementioned Miss Swift, of hideously CGI-ed felines. He landed one of the prime roles, Macavity, and even got his own song, but alas, nobody was talking about his singing by the end of the film, but about how atrocious the film was.
Cats is the sort of bad movie that only comes along every once in a while, the perfect storm of a big budget, an insane cast, an unmanageable premise, and some truly horrendous special effects.
Unless you get a kick from seeing a fluffy James Corden somehow making a bigger tit of himself than usual, then there is nothing here for you, which is why the film bombed, and Hooper hasn’t released a feature since, which makes one wonder just how much worse it could have been if they’d kept the buttholes.
As for Elba, he seems to have been just as traumatised by the whole experience as we were. He hasn’t appeared in another musical since, devoting his time to his traditional mixture of dramas and action flicks, and he is scheduled to voice a character in the upcoming movie High in the Sky, based on a children’s book by Paul McCartney. You’d like to think that’ll turn out a little bit better, but you never know with Sir Paul.
The actor might not have gotten the musical debut of his dreams, but at least he can say he played one of the genre’s most iconic characters, but he’d probably prefer if we all just forgot it ever happened.
