Idris Elba

Elba’s Stringer Bell in The Wire (2002) makes a criminal calculation seem worth listening to. Alongside Wood Harris’s Avon Barksdale, he gives the drug trade the same serious attention the programme gives the police. We were unsettled by how readily we followed Stringer’s reasoning; Elba lets us understand his decisions without inviting us to approve of them. Stringer remains interesting even after we have understood what he tells us about Baltimore. We rate Elba most highly here, where the writing gives him something difficult to think through.

As DCI John Luther in Luther (2010–2019), he had the sustained demands of a leading role. Then Thor (2011), with Elba as Heimdall, began a run of major Hollywood supporting and voice work. The attraction is plain: he can supply an ensemble with authority before the script has done much to establish it. There was still room for the Commandant in Beasts of No Nation (2015), an authority figure whose charisma makes his ruthlessness more disturbing. But the larger productions have too often asked for his reassuring presence and stopped there.

Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite (2025) gives him more to work with, even though the role mostly asks him to listen. As the President, he has to consider a question with no decent answer, and Elba makes him seem painfully aware of that. The performance is good because he takes the responsibility seriously without making a display of it. The film’s repeated eighteen-minute structure costs it tension, but his restraint keeps our attention on the man being asked to decide.

The limits are clearer in Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe (2026), where Duncan is the dependable adult in a film whose joking wears thin. Elba steadies it, but there is little sense that the part requires him to discover anything. His Chief Bogo in Zootopia 2 (2025) is reduced to the familiar glower, with nothing new asked of the returning character. Neither appearance gives us much reason to revise what we already know he can do. Try The Wire before deciding that he is merely the sensible man sent in to steady a crowded film.