Idris Elba

Following a crisis in Elba's personal life, the Hackney-born star had gambled with his burgeoning American film career by moving from Los Angeles back to ...

He was already ill and he was in tears. 'It was early in our relationship and suddenly we were at home together and we realised that was a space that people didn't know how to negotiate very well because it doesn't usually happen until you're older,' he says. I'm desperate for him to be the man he wants to be – strong and considerate.' I ask if it's harder parenting a boy now than it was Isan, 20 years ago, and he says: 'I have three kids actually. Whatever that personal crisis was in 2010, it clearly left him in a bad state: when the BBC approached him about Luther, he originally thought he was being asked to play the soul singer Luther Vandross. 'I had an epiphany as he was climbing up the wall and I realised he was on his hands and knees and they had turned the camera,' he says. He was born Idrissa Akuna Elba in 1972, only child of Winston, a Sierra Leonean shop steward and production-line worker at Ford Dagenham, and Eve, a clerical worker from Ghana. He went to a school nearby, he tells me, after his comprehensive in Stoke Newington was closed down following an asbestos scare, and he and his mates had lunch on this very street. I just had an ambition that was bigger than the playing field I was on at the time. It was a rough time in my life, I was transitioning through a lot of stuff, and coming back to England and moving to Islington, shooting a TV show for the BBC, was so grounding. And I got to play this character who was very "Raaaar!" It also contains sly allusions to James Bond, a role Elba has been associated with for a decade or so, but which he comprehensively ruled himself out of last month, telling an audience in Dubai: 'I'm not gonna be that guy.' Because a guy is drinking a pint in a pub, does that make him a "lad"?