"Women and men 'crush' on him in equal measure (a crucial 007 requirement that's absent from most actors CVs)". Photo / Getty Images
"Women and men 'crush' on him in equal measure (a crucial 007 requirement that's absent from most actors CVs)". Photo / Getty Images
Opinion
"My name's Elba, Idris Elba." Twenty-seven characters were all it took to send the Twittersphere into meltdown on the weekend. That and a 007-tastic selfie of the Hackney-born Luther star – cropped to the point of inscrutability.
After four years' conjecture that Elba was to be the first black Bond, was this confirmation? Or was it – the time on the Tweet reads 1.02am, after all – just a titillating "dweet" (drunk tweet, natch) at the end of a long Saturday night?
Either way the re-tweets came in their thousands: jubilant, virulent and often plain moronic thoughts on race, new dawns, cultural appropriation, artistic integrity, Martin Luther King, the importance of British identity, bigoted extremists (from both the Left and Right), the British Empire and Hollywood misogyny (how could Scarlett Johansson be overlooked for the role again?).
Debates raged over whether or not Ian Fleming wrote some of his books in Jamaica – and if so, did that really matter given Elba's father is Sierra Leonean and his mother Ghanaian? Should Tom Cruise now be cast in the Black Panther sequel, people demanded to know?
And the logical sequitur: "Will Abu Hamza now play the Queen?"
As entertaining as the enduring hysteria has been – a hysteria that by the way, the Wire actor will have predicted – it does seem to have detracted from only issue at hand: would Elba make a good Bond?
And the answer to that is a gazillion dollars worth of yesses. Making Elba the world's eighth Bond may happen to be a politically correct choice, but it would also be the correct choice. He's an extraordinary actor – with just the right menace-to-vulnerability ratio – who can rock a Tom Ford suit better than any catwalk model.
Women and men 'crush' on him in equal measure (a crucial 007 requirement that's absent from most actors CVs), and I for one want to hear that silky voice stipulating "shaken, not stirred." And no that's not a racial thing, but a smoothness thing. Christ, Elba managed to make a lazy harbor seal in Finding Dory sound sexy.
So if his tweet does turn out to be a teaser to Barbara Broccoli's formal anointment, then I wouldn't just say that Babs had made the right choice – but that Elba could well end up being the best Bond in over 30 years.
I shouldn't like the guy as much as I do. When I sat down with him in a midtown New York hotel years ago, he made me wait a full 90-minutes (something on-the-up actors tend to do when they're still at the pistol-fingers-in-the-bathroom-mirror stage) before finally sauntering in with a bottle of Bud in his hand.
The great acting I already knew about, from his portrayal of Stringer Bell, but within minutes Elba had won me over with the voice, the smile (no-one from our dentally challenged side of the pond should have that smile) and the flirtiness. And if I hadn't been going out with my husband at the time, I would've agreed to have dinner with Elba when he asked me. God knows, that's the closest I'll ever get to being a Bond girl.
But perhaps the most charming thing about the actor was his lack of pomposity about everything from his first role in Crimewatch ("playing a guy who chopped his girlfriend up and put her in the freezer… shot at the actual crime scene – they'd stripped the walls because of the blood spatters") to what he called "the elephant in the room."
"There are only so many roles for black actors in England. People get all excited," he went on, puffing out his chest and adopting a hysterical voice. "'That's racist', they say. It's not racist. If you go to Africa and you're white, you're probably not going to get that much work either."
"He's an extraordinary actor - with just the right menace-to-vulnerability ratio - who can rock a Tom Ford suit better than any catwalk model." Photo / AP
With Daniel Craig back next year in the 25th Bond film (his last) – believed to be based on Raymond Benson's book Never Dream of Dying – Elba's super spy stint may still be a way off. But to swing back to the haters for a moment: no he's not too old at 45, no it wouldn't be "PC gone f------ mad", and no the movie wouldn't have to involve Bond being subjected to a series of microaggresions that would include "being pulled over in his Aston Martin" and ID'd by racist cops.
We've gone from six foot two Scots and dimple-chinned Welsh and Irishmen to diminutive blonde thespians without anyone, aside their succession of on-screen female conquests, batting an eyelid.
It's fiction, folks, and as long as Bond doesn't start wearing "This is what a feminist looks like" t-shirts and identifying as anything other than an amoral macho dinosaur with a dual specialism in wince-inducing puns and ghastly double-entendres, I for one will keep watching.
The next James Bond?
The leading candidates to play James Bond, in order of bookies' odds.
Tom Hardy • Odds: 6/4 • As seen in: Inception, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Dark Knight rises, The Revenant
