Idris Elba on the "therapy" of playing villains: "That's sometimes a gift"
The actor has played bad guys in both serious dramas like Beasts of No Nation and more light-hearted fare like Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw.
Idris Elba has embodied his fair share of both heroes and villains over the years – and the Luther star has revealed that sometimes playing antagonists can be "a bit of therapy".
The actor – whose bad guys roles have included parts in both serious dramas like Beasts of No Nation and more light-hearted fare like Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw – made the comments during a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal.
He explained: "These people get to say things that we only think in the deepest, darkest recesses of our brains.
"They say horrible things and scream horrible things and get to be completely socially unacceptable. As an actor, that’s sometimes a gift, sometimes a bit of therapy."
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But he pointed out that there was one thing that was essential when it came to playing evil characters: they had to be well-written.
"When you see a really interesting bad guy, you’re going to think about the actor, but think about the writer," he added. "It’s the writer who’s dark. You’ve got to give him or her a hug."
Elba's career has seen him take on a huge variety of often very different roles, with his credits running the gamut from one of the most well-regarded TV shows of all time in The Wire to one of the worst reviewed films ever made in Cats.
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Recent credits have included leading the Apple TV+ thriller series Hijack, reprising his iconic role as John Luther in Netflix film spin-off Luther: The Fallen Sun and voicing Knuckles the Echidna in both Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and a self-titled TV series for Paramount Plus.
And he has a lot of future projects in the pipeline too: with upcoming film roles set to include the action-comedy Heads of State from Nobody director Ilya Naishuller, the animated black comedy Fixed, and the survival thriller Above the Below, which he is also co-directing.
As for when he'll next be playing one of those unrepentant bad guys, we'll have to just wait and see. After all those rumours about him becoming 007 over the years, maybe he'd actually prefer the chance to play a Bond villain...
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Authors
Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.
