Idris Elba has said he ‘doesn’t have the courage’ to be a politician as A House of Dynamite, in which he plays the US president, premieres at Venice Film Festival.
Elba, 52, heads up a sprawling cast that also features the likes of Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, Jason Clarke, Greta Lee and The Night Agent’s Gabriel Basso in the Netflix political thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
The British star – who also recently played the Prime Minister in action-comedy Heads of State – praised politicians for the bravery they have to develop in their careers to help them make difficult choices.
‘I think you have to give it to people that enter politics – the life cycle and going on an educative curve to become a politician means that you have to adopt that courage really early because then you’re faced with these impossible predicaments,’ he told journalists including Metro on Tuesday afternoon.
‘It’s about your judgement then; it’s about what you know, what you’ve learned, what you’ve lived through, and your courage.
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‘So I learned I don’t have the courage to be in politics, that’s for sure!’
Elba reportedly emerged as a surprise frontrunner to become Labour’s next candidate for Mayor of London earlier this year, following his highly-praised campaigning against knife crime – which included BBC documentary Our Knife Crime Crisis in January.
A House of Dynamite follows in real-time the scramble when a single unattributed missile is launched at America as a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.
It follows the same span of time from three different points of view, with Elba’s segment filming last.
‘Kathryn was very clear that we really wanted to feel the pressure of this particular 18 minutes now, having made the movie for the other two storylines. So it’s quite tense, quite intense and ultra-realistic in terms of what we understood to be a true reaction in a situation like this,’ he explained.
The Luther actor also called shooting the film ‘an incredible ride’ and ‘like being in a documentary’.
At one particularly high stress moment, Elba’s president is shown calling his wife, which prompted the question of if that’s how Elba would react in real life. He married 36-year-old model Sabrina Dhowre, his third wife, in 2019.
To laughs, he responded: ‘I would call my wife, and then Kathryn actually!’
Bigelow, who was the first woman to win the Oscar for best director and is directing her first film since 2017, said that it was ‘passion’ that had driven her to choose this as her latest project.
‘I felt it was so important to get this conversation out there, and then we can begin to evaluate. This is a global issue, where we are with nuclear weapons,’ Bigelow shared.
She later added: ‘I want them all gone. I mean, how is annihilating the world a good defensive measure? What are you defending? That’s my question.’
Mission: Impossible star Ferguson revealed that working on A House of Dynamite had sparked ‘interest, knowledge and an open communication within my family’ about nuclear weapons and global politics.
‘I’m not politically astute. I have opinions, and I don’t always want to raise them unless I am very well read in the matter, because I think that can be very counterbalancing,’ Ferguson said.
‘But it has made me more interested and realise that the fragility we live under, even though we live under peace sometimes, we are constantly in a world of dynamite, right?’
Her castmate Harris also shared that he was grateful he would never be put in the ‘nightmare’ situation of having to make a decision about a potential nuclear strike.
‘Just watching the film itself, I didn’t sleep for a week afterwards. So I think if I was in that situation, I’d never sleep,’ he admitted.
A House of Dynamite releases in select UK cinemas on October 3 before streaming exclusively on Netflix from October 24.
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