Idris Elba’s portrayal of astute drug kingpin Stringer Bell on HBO’s legendary series, “The Wire,” made him a household name but the role definitely had more backstories attached to it than the public knew.
The 51-year-old actor recently appeared on Spotify’s “What Now? with Trevor Noah” podcast and shared some hilarious stories about his time on the series, including hiding his accent as he went through the audition process.
“There’s one casting director, I talk about it all the time, Alexa Fogel,” the Concrete Cowboy actor recalls. “She would put me up for stuff and she said, ‘Hey, listen. This ‘Wire’ thing’s come up. It’s called ‘The Wire.’ It’s a pilot. They’re going to shoot it in January. But if you go in, you cannot let them know you aren’t American because they will not — I mean, this is about Baltimore. It’s very specific. They don’t want any strangers. I mean, please.’ ”
By this time, Elba says he’d been living in Brooklyn and New Jersey and spent time soaking up the language while moonlighting as a bouncer and DJ so he was confident he could pull it off. He says things went well until the fourth and final audition when the producers shocked him by asking him, “Where are you from?”
“They told you, ‘Don’t say nothing,’ ” he recalled thinking to himself as he sweat, “I’m thinking, ‘Your accent is s—. They sussed you.’ I look at him and I said, ‘I’m from East London.’ The room just exploded.”
Turns out suspicion about Elba’s origin had been growing throughout the process and the showrunners had placed bets on whether he was American or not.
Another interesting tidbit shared by Elba was the story about how he found out his character was being killed in the show.
“I didn’t know my character was gonna die until we got the episode,” admitted Elba.
“You usually get your scripts, you know, like two, three in a row, they write them,” Elba explained. “And I think the way I got it, I got episode seven. I was like, ‘Oh, um, episode seven. I got episode seven. Where’s eight? Can I get eight? What’s wrong?’ ”
“‘Uh, you’re not, not, you’re not in eight,’” he said reenacting his conversation with the show’s producers. “ ‘What do you mean? I’m not in eight?’ ‘You should read, you should read it.’ That’s how I kind of found out.”
Since leaving the “The Wire” in 2004, Elba has gone on to great success as one of the top 20 highest-grossing actors in Hollywood amassing just under $10 billion at the global box office. In 2016, Elba was named to the Time 100 list of Most Influential People in the world.
“The Wire” is currently streaming on Max.
