Idris Elba’s Ten Greatest Performances Ranked

Obsessed isn’t a particularly original movie (Fatal Attraction, anyone?), and it’s not exactly high art. But it is a very enjoyable trashy little thriller, with an interesting racial undercurrent (that could have been explored a bit more tbh). Elba and Beyonce are happily married couple who’s life is turned up upside down when new colleague Ali Larter starts getting the wrong signals from him—and ends up going full crazy on the two of them. Subtle, it aint, but it’s a lot of fun, and it was one of the first times Elba played a straight heroic lead instead of a cool AF anti-hero.

Idris only has a small part in Ridley Scott’s sweeping 70s crime epic, getting killed off early on by Denzel’s Frank Lucas. But it’s a memorable little role, for several reasons. For one, he gets to wear a sweet pimp hat. He also holds his own with Denzel Washington, showing how powerful an actor he could be. And probably most importantly, he lead to him hooking up with Jay Z and appearing on the soundtrack album. And featuring on a Jay Z record is a pretty dope life goal to achieve.

Fresh off The Wire, Elba had an extended guest run in the fifth season of US version of The Office. He played Charles Miner, the no-nonsense Vice President of Northeast Sales for Dunder Mifflin, who quickly got pissed off at (and ultimately played by) Michael Scott. Idris is known for his big, intense performances, so it’s pretty great to see him have a sense of humour and play off his reputation.

Dropping the same summer as both The Expendables and The A-Team remake, the 2010 men-on-a-mission movie The Losers kind of got lost in the shuffle. Which is a shame, because it’s a fantastic straight-up action movie with lot of humour, and is definitely more exciting than its two higher-profile competitors. Plus it has one of the dopest ensemble casts in recent history, bringing together not just Elba, but also Chris Evens, Zoe Saldana, and Jeffery Dean Morgan. Idris obviously holds his own, and what other film do you get to see Stringer Bell go up against Captain America?

Guillermo Del Toro’s Godzillas-versus-Transformers mash-up doesn’t quite hit all the right marks—the CGI is frequently stodgy and joyless, and Charlie Hunnam might be the most boring leading man on the whole fucking planet. But Idris Elba as the leader the Earth’s armies, uniting all the world’s people for one final battle? That’s inspiring. And when he screams that “Today, we are cancelling the apocalypse!” (dropping his American accent for a second to go full East London, which only makes it better), that shit’ll get you pumped.

The adaption of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography was meant to The Weinstein Company’s big 2013 Oscar play. It didn’t really work out that way though. While Mandela’s story is obviously powerful and important, the film was generally received as needy and desperate Oscar-bait, and had basically been forgotten by the time we got to awards season. Yet while the movie might have not been great, Elba’s performance definitely was, and critics were quick to single it out as its key redeeming feature. Playing Nelson Mandela is a massive undertaking, and Elba was definitely up to the task.

When it was announced that Elba was returning to TV to star in a big BBC cop drama, we were sort of expecting the British take on The Wire or something. But where as David Simon’s opus was subtle and realistic, Luther most definitely not. DCI John Luther is the ultimate cop-on-the-edge, a broken man and a swaggering ball of rage, kicking the shit out of criminals and looking cool AF in a tweed coat and straggly red tie. As the show has gone on it’s just got crazier and crazier, and proved that Brit TV can match up anything the US puts out.

Despite now being a legit Hollywood main-eventer, it’s nice to see Idris return to his London roots. The low-key Second Coming is one of the best British movies of 2015, and sees Elba drop the US glitz to play an ordinary working class guy who works on the railways and just trying to provide for his family. His wife (the excellent Nadine Marshall) suddenly gets pregnant—despite the fact the couple have basically stopped having sex by this point—and the film details the slow-burn breakdown of their relationship. Elba is utterly pitch-perfect, demonstrating a tender, honest relationship with his on-screen son, as well as the seething rage and mistrust bubbling in him from the mysterious pregnancy. Seek it out.

Read our review of Second Coming.

One of Elba’s greatest skills as an actor has been his ability to be utterly charismatic, yet genuinely scary at the same time. And nowhere is this better displayed than in the Netflix original film Beasts Of No Nation. The film follows a small boy in an unnamed African village, whose life is destroyed when his family are murdered by violent rebels, and he's then forced to become a child solider. Idris doesn’t appear for a good half hour, but when he makes his entrance as the vicious Commandant of the battalion, his impact is instantly felt. It’s an Oscar-worthy performance, with Elba slowly revealing a side to the Commandant that suggests he might not be any more mature than the child soldiers he leads.

Read our review of Beasts Of No Nation.

As if the top choice was going to be anything else? It’s the role that fired Idris Elba from an unknown to one of the coolest actors of his generation. Do you remember when we all watched it for the first time, and didn’t even know that he was British? Stringer Bell is still one of the greatest TV characters of all time, a criminal from the streets who aspires to be a business man, who studies business theory and applies it to the drug game, and yet keeps getting dragged back to the street. It’s a role of a lifetime, and Elba smacks it out of the park every single episode.