Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Idris Elba’s career has so far hopped a lot of genres. He’s done crime dramas like The Wire and Luther, and also traveled to far out realms in the Thor trilogy and Star Trek Beyond. Still, there’s territory he has not yet traveled to – until now. That territory is… comedy.
Elba is diving into the genre with a new UK comedy series titled In the Long Run, which is now airing on Sky One (information about a United States remains unknown).
“I like it,” explained Elba to Mashable. “I like the freedom of [comedy]. I think with drama obviously you follow a narrative in a certain way. But with comedy you can on the day come up with something really stupid and make the crew laugh that actually might work in the show. I love doing that.”
Elba’s first significant foray into comedy is an autobiographical project about his childhood set in 1980s London. And in In the Long Run, Elba is playing essentially his own father. Elba addressed why he decided to make his story a comedic one rather than a drama.
“I wanted to make it a comedy because I wanted to try my hand at comedy — doing a comedic role, at which I fail miserably!” joked Elba. “But that said it felt too heavy to be a drama; it felt like there was a statement to be made if we did a drama and we didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to focus on racism from a point of view of like, ‘Oh my God, this is what it was like in the ’80s’. So we wanted to take a comedic stance, and like I said selfishly I wanted to… I wanted to be in [British sitcom] Only Fools and Horses, you know what I mean, I just never got the audition.”
Now that he’s conquering comedy, there’s another genre Elba hopes to cross of his list soon: “A musical. I would love to do a musical. It’s just something I haven’t done that I would like to do.”
