Beasts of No Nation was 'personal' for Idris Elba

Idris Elba (R) plays the Commandant, a sadistic rebel leader in an unnamed African country. Photo / Supplied

Forget Idris Elba as the first black James Bond for a minute. "No comment" became the sexy 43-year-old's refrain during our recent Toronto interview.

The British actor, who was arguably the biggest thing to come out of David Simon's predominantly African American series, The Wire, has instead been testing the boundaries in a different vein. Beasts of No Nation, in which he stars, is spearheading streaming giant Netflix's first foray into the cinema market.

While only spare US and UK audiences will see Beasts on the big screen, the exposure affords the film an entree into the Oscars for Elba and his young co-star, Abraham Attah, as well as for director Cary Fukunaga, who previously made the first True Detective series.

As it happens, Fukunaga had studied political science at university and had long wanted to adapt Uzodinma Iweala's 2005 novel about child soldiers into a feature film. Elba, buoyed by playing African leader Nelson Mandela and keen to explore his own roots, came on as a producer and threw his considerable heft behind the low budget US$6 million (NZ$9 million) film. Netflix picked it up for US$12 million.

"This story is close to me because my parents come from Sierra Leone which is a country that was ravaged [by war] as you know," Elba explains. "My family are definitely connected to a story like this and I just thought: I have to be a part of this film. It also gave me an opportunity to play a different and challenging character so I said 'yes' immediately."

Elba plays the Commandant, a sadistic rebel leader in an unnamed African country. He takes a particular shine to one of his recruits Agu (Attah) and so do we. We watch through Agu's eyes as he is indoctrinated into killing.

The young teen Attah deservedly took out the Venice Festival's Marcello Mastroianni Award for his performance. He was untrained like the other 200 extras on the shoot in Ghana, a country with few filmmaking facilities, so it was decided that a kind of military operation would be employed, with the children divided into squadrons. By the time Elba came on board, a lot of the groundwork had been done by one of his fellow actors.

"The guy who plays Tripod, my naked lieutenant, was in charge," Elba explains. "He calls himself Anointed, he is from Liberia and was exiled to Ghana. He's a preacher now and he had to get people into order very quickly. When he turned into the guy who ran the boot camp for the extras he was frightening."

One of the reasons the hulking Elba became much loved by audiences is that he brought his own natural warmth and traces of his sense of humour to his drug lord Stinger Bell in The Wire - and to his renegade cop in Luther. Though he occasionally allows a vulnerability to seep through the cracks of his steely veneer in Beasts, he mostly had to maintain his character's indomitable pose.

"I didn't want to come in and frighten people; I'm just an actor, darling," Elba muses in his London tones. "But I realised very quickly that after the kids had three weeks with Anointed and he'd been terrorising them, that I had to get into character, and stay there."

It was tough, says Elba, as he has his own children: a daughter who is around Agu's age and a baby son born in April last year.

"Even when I watch the film I'm in tears because I hate to see children suffering, I just hate it. And now that I have kids it's even worse.

"But the rapport with Ibrahim was real. I adore him and he adores me but in reality, on set we didn't have much to do with each other. He kept it that way; he kept a healthy distance from me, which he used in the film. And you could see it actually, it's quite beautiful to watch and it's instinctual."

Beasts of No Nation starring Idris Elba and directed by Cary Fukunaga. Photo / Supplied

Elba took on an African accent ("Sierra Leonean but with a twinge of Nigerian thrown in, just to be fancy"), which became so ingrained that after filming wrapped he was still speaking the same way.

"The day after I finished, I flew to Ibiza and I DJ'ed as soon as I got there. I just let my hair down so much. I shaved that beard off and everything and he was gone - but one thing that happens to me, a kind of character residue, is that his accent stayed around. I couldn't shake it off." Elba's deep booming voice is surely a powerful tool.

"Yeah, I'm learning that more. I didn't go to drama school, so I didn't learn all that technical stuff. Now I actually spend time with voice coaches and people who can help me with my speech because it's actually quite fascinating to see what else I can bring out of my chamber. In the film I'm making at the moment, Star Trek Beyond, my timbre's way down and it's really tough to do."

Are you a mean mother f***er? "Mmmm," he mutters in a voice as deep as Darth Vader's. "There's a little residue of this role there." Elba's mysterious villain will face off against the crew of the Enterprise in the film, which has been co-scripted by co-star and funnyman Simon Pegg. "There's a lot of prosthetics in my character," Elba explains. "I guess I'm not allowed to say that but I've said it now! The puppetry nature of that is incredible. It's like it came from toys and the imagination and from 'you're the bad guy', 'you're the good guy' and from all the voices and faces you do as a kid. I'm absolutely living in a space that's mostly my inner boy. I wasn't really a big Star Trek fan but I grew up around it of course as it was all over our TVs as a kid."

Idrissa Akuna Elba was born in Sierra Leone and his name was shortened to Idris after his family moved to London when he was a child. He grew up in the multicultural neighbourhood of East Ham, where his father, who died two years ago, worked in a Ford motor factory, while his Ghanaian mother worked in clerical jobs. He had never been to Ghana before filming Beasts there.

"I hadn't been because my parents couldn't afford to take me when I was younger," he says.

"Now my mum loves anything I do that has anything to do with Africa of course, but this was especially touching to her because it was the first time I'd gone to her country of birth. We had 10 days there before I started shooting and so my mum was very proud."

What did he learn about his roots that he didn't know before? "I got to know my extended family and I got to know where my height comes from because it doesn't come from my dad's side. Believe it or not, on my mum's side they're all really tall, tall women and men."

Did the film inspire a stronger social consciousness in him? "From the initial point when I came on as an actor-producer, there was talk of where we should shoot it. The location was a massive deal for me because I didn't want to shoot this story in South Africa on a sound stage. I said: 'Let's go to Ghana. Let's go to a place that doesn't have the infrastructure but has the authenticity because that's what's going to make this film come alive.'

"The jungle plays a big part in this film. It's not described where we are but you feel the real Africa. So it definitely made me aware, socially, about what we say about Africa through the images we constructed. And if we're going to do it, let's do it right. Which is why Ghana played a really big part for me."

Elba does not hold back on his opinions. He hopes the film will engender debate that will make the issues more familiar.

"If you look at the refugee situation in Europe, it's very similar to how Africa's become entrenched with the wars there. It's poverty, it's a lack of leadership and it's devastating. So when you look at Sierra Leone, it was just getting back on its feet and then Ebola comes along.

"This film is timely because you look around the world and you say, 'Wow, these kids in the film aren't the only children going through a lot of turmoil, there are kids in Syria and other places of conflict'. This isn't necessarily a film about child soldiers. If you really watch it again it's about how the hell does a country eat itself alive like that from poverty?"

• Beasts of No Nation is available to watch on Netflix now.