Idris Elba: ‘Yardie captured my imagination’

Idris Elba was inspired by 1992 novel Yardie, which he’s adapted in his directorial debut.

The British actor has taken Victor Headley’s story to the big screen, with a cast including Aml Ameen, Shantol Jackson and Stephen Graham, having been blown away by the book’s content when he read it as a teenager.

“If someone said, ‘Read a novel,’ you were like, ‘Mills & Boon? I’m not reading no novels.’ This was called Yardie, man. This was about a rude boy on the streets,” Idris recalled in an interview with Britain’s Empire magazine. “There were no films about rude boys on the street, there were no TV shows about rude boys. The cover had a guy’s face with a gun pointing at you; it was like ‘Well, I’ve gotta read this.’ And it was compelling – it’s a page-turner. It certainly captured my imagination.”

Yardie – which usually refers to Jamaican gangs or organised crime groups – tells the story of a young Jamaican man, named D, whose plans to abandon a life of crime change when he encounters the man who murdered his brother ten years ago. Much of the film is set in 1980s Hackney, a borough in London where Idris was born in 1972. To emphasise his connection to the film’s setting, Idris – who also DJs under the moniker DJ Big Driis - gave the film a more musical focus.

“I wanted to make it more relatable and real,” he explained. “The reality of being a young lad in England. My offering was that needle-drop into the culture, and the music was the way through to that. I was never a gangster in the way D was, but I was around the culture.”

Yardie hits U.K. cinemas 31 August (18).