Idris Akuna Elba OBE, an English actor, was born on September 6, 1972. He graduated from the National Youth Theatre in London and is most recognised for his performances as Nelson Mandela in the historical movie Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom and Stringer Bell in the HBO series Luther (2010–2019). (2013). He was nominated four times each for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for Luther, winning the latter.
Idrissa Akuna Elba, an only child, was born and reared in London, England. His mother Eve is from Ghana and worked as a secretary; his father Winston is from Sierra Leone and worked at Ford Dagenham. Idris walked out of school when he was still a student at Canning Town, where he initially got into acting. He was given a $1,500 Prince’s Trust award, which helped him get a spot in the National Youth Music Theatre. In between acting gigs, he supported himself by changing tyres, making cold calls to advertise, and working night shifts at Ford Dagenham. At the age of 19, he started working in nightclubs as DJ Big Driis, but it wasn’t until his early twenties that he started applying for television jobs.
Elba’s breakthrough role in his acting career came on the HBO criminal thriller The Wire, where he appeared for three seasons (2002–2004) as the shrewd businessman and drug lord Russell (“Stringer”) Bell. In the American adaptation of the sitcom The Office, he expanded into comedy, and in the comedy-drama The Big C, he entered the romance genre. Later, Elba received praise for his portrayal of the complicated antihero Detective Chief Inspector John Luther in the drama Luther (2010–19). In addition to receiving three Emmy Award nominations and a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Award nomination for his portrayal of the brilliant but destructive Luther, he won a Golden Globe Award (2012). The 2017 miniseries Guerrilla, which is about radical revolutionaries in 1970s London, was one of Elba’s latter TV appearances.
In this period, the towering 6-foot-3-inch (1.9-meter) Elba also made an appearance on the big screen in Belle Maman, his feature film debut (1999; Beautiful Mother). He then had appearances in movies including Obsessed (2009), American Gangster, and 28 Weeks Later in 2007. He debuted in 2011’s Thor as the Norse god Heimdall, a part he later returned to in Thor 2: The Dark World (2013), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Thor: Ragnarok (2017), and Avengers: Infinity War (2018). In Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013), the versatile actor won praise for his poignant depiction of Nelson Mandela as well as his terrifying performance as the Commandant, a vicious warlord in charge of young soldiers in an unnamed African civil war.
With Yardie, a drama about a drug courier dispatched to London who wants retribution for the death of his brother, Elba makes his feature film directing debut in 2018. He also produced the comic television series In the Long Run that same year, in which he also took part. When he played a struggling DJ in the British TV series Turn Up Charlie (2019), which he also cocreated, Elba went back to his origins once more. Then, in the 2019 action film Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, a spin-off of the popular franchise, he portrayed the villain.
His other 2019 credits included the family-friendly musical Cats, a movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s wildly popular stage performance. In Concrete Cowboy (2020), Elba played a father who uses urban horseback riding to rekindle his relationship with his kid. When Elba played the supervillain Bloodsport in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, he officially became a part of the DC Extended Universe, a shared cinematic universe for the characters from DC Comics. In the revenge western The Harder They Fall from the same year, he also played an outlaw. Elba played a djinn in George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, one of numerous movies he acted in in 2022.
ALSO READ THIS : Realive 2016 Recap And Explained
