Coming up on what is sure to be a promising awards season for the dapper Brit, Vogue Magazine smartly tapped Idris for a feature article in their latest issue. The article, titled “Mandela’s Idris Elba Has Made the World His Stage,” chronicles Idris’ role as the late Nelson Mandela, drawing parallels to the pair while touching lightly on Idris’ acting background and his effect on the ladies.
Check out some excerpts below.
Idris on meeting Mandela:
“He’s a nice guy,” he tells me. (They’ve met once before, at a state dinner where Elba was a guest of Britain’s prime minister.) “I go to shake his hand, and he’s like, ‘Come on, man! Give me a dap.’
On filling Madiba’s shoes:
“I’ve been told I have presence. I’ve been told I’m charismatic. But I’m not Nelson Mandela,” he jokes. “Everybody has a sense of who Mandela is—his nobleness, his white hair, his voice. Those were big shoes to fill. I felt like that would be the challenge: to create Mr. Mandela’s presence on film for people who have never met him.”
On the new album he is working on:
He’s just finished cutting the first two tracks of his first full-length album, called Mi Mandela. “Each song is about some sort of feeling, some sort of transitional moment, while I was playing him,” he says. “I took some musicians down to South Africa, and I created this soundscape.”
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