Idris Elba Interview, The Reaping

MoviesOnline sat down with Idris Elba to discuss his new movie, "The Reaping,” a supernatural thriller directed by Stephen Hopkins which explores a series of bizarre occurrences in the Deep South. The film is steeped in atmosphere and anchored by one of contemporary film’s most acclaimed actresses, Hilary Swank.

Swank plays Katherine Winter, a woman who lost her faith when her family was killed while on a religious mission in the Sudan. Now a university professor, she devotes her life to debunking myths and miracles and travels around the world figuring out what’s really behind them. Her partner in her work is Ben, a former student and fellow professor at the university, played by British actor Idris Elba. "We’re biologists, scientists, that debunk miracles,” Idris relates, "as in religious miracles. If you see Jesus’s face on a tree, you’ll make a phone call and a couple of scientists will come up and tell you you’re crazy..or you have a real live miracle on your hands.”

But where Katherine approaches these mysteries believing she’ll find a scientific explanation, Ben hopes to confirm his own religious faith. "It’s an interesting dilemma between them because Katherine is a complete atheist now and has no interest in finding a real miracle,” explains Elba. "In fact, when she arrives at a place where there’s a so-called miracle, she’s just short of laughing out loud when she sees what’s really going on. In contract, Ben is doing this for his own religious beliefs – to prove that God exists, scientifically.”

Director Stephen Hopkins had worked with Elba on a pilot and brought him along to an event to introduce him to the film’s producer, Joel Silver. "He’s just tremendously handsome and charismatic, and he and Hilary had a great rapport, which carried over to the screen,” the director asserts. "Idris is this huge, seemingly intimidating guy, but you just want to be his pal. And he can play anything. He’s just an awesome actor.”

Idris Elba is perhaps best known for his role as the calculating de facto leader of a Baltimore drug empire in HBO’s critically acclaimed original series "The Wire.” In 2005, he received an Image Award nomination for his work on the series. Elba most recently starred in Tyler Perry’s "Daddy’s Little Girls” with Gabrielle Union. He next stars in the horror thriller "28 Weeks Later,” the much-anticipated sequel to the zombie hit "28 Days Later.” He also recently completed production on Ridley Scott’s "American Gangster,” with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, and is currently filming the holiday comedy "This Christmas.”

Idris Elba is a fabulous guy and a very talented actor and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell about making "The Reaping,” working with Hilary Swank, and dealing with creepy critters that reside deep in the heart of the Louisiana bayou:

Q: I have to ask you. Were the scars real?

IE: [Laughs] Uh, no.

Q: Very convincing. They were very convincing.

IE: Real plastic.

Q: Do you know who the team was?

IE: I forgot the name of the team. They were amazing. You know I have tattoos, but I had to put on all these tattoos every day and they’re a really interesting process of tracing latex on your skin and then painting the tattoos in. It was a nightmare. It was four hours every day but no, they were really great. They looked real, didn’t they?

Q: How often did you have to go through that whole process?

IE: Every two days. Because they would last so long, but once you would go home and take a shower and everything, they would start coming off.

Q: What attracted you to this project?

IE: The script is wonderful, you know. It was very complex, very deep. I call it a spiritual thriller, a supernatural thriller if you like. The idea that something from the Bible was – what we see in the Bible and we know very well as a story is actually going to happen in a small town and it’s fascinating to me.

Q: Your character’s kind of like the Mulder to Hilary’s Scully?

IE: Right. Scully. [Laughs]

Q: That’s an interesting dynamic to switch that up and make it a male lead character.

IE: Right. It was interesting to me for a religious man like Ben to want to go and debunk miracles, to find God as opposed to being like, ‘ha, ha. You thought it was God, but there’s no God here.’ He was going to really prove that God existed scientifically and that was interesting to me. That was interesting to me. Yeah, you’re right actually.

Q: Was there a lot of development between you and the director on your character along the way. It seems like it could have started off as just the sidekick character that explains everything, but he’s really somebody that audiences come to care about during the film.

IE: Yeah, the original script needed Ben’s character and the relationship between Ben and Katherine to develop and that was something that Stephen and I had discussed and Hilary and I had discussed. You know we tried to find ways to gel that without beating it on the head. It’s obvious that she’s a skeptic and I’m sort of like I believe. We didn’t want to beat that sort of dynamic on the head, but we needed to show that a) we’re professionals and b) we’re good friends and we enjoyed doing what we did. And then because that dynamic was real, the story arc became more relevant as these two characters went through it. So yeah, the director and I really tried to be aware of that the whole way through the film.

Q: You and Hilary really had strong chemistry together that really worked. Did you fall into that groove right away?

IE: Yeah, I think there’s professional actors that work with each other well, sort of want to work with each other well. If I respect your craft and you respect mine, you want to go out and do a good scene together because you trust each other. So that was apparent off the bat. Hilary had seen my work and had to have approved me, so I’m sure she likes what I was doing, and obviously I love what she does, and so that worked for us and it worked for us building these characters together, making them friends on the screen. And I recently saw the film and I was like, ‘wow, they look like real friends up there.’ [Laughs] No, we are friends, but it was nice to see a real relationship in that. It’s important.

Q: Did you stay pretty close to script or did you ad lib in some of the scenes?

IE: Some of the more playful and more relaxed scenes were ad libbed perhaps, but a lot of it was to script. We couldn’t deviate too much because of the subject matter. [Laughs] Because I don’t know what I’m talking about clearly, you know, but it was important that we stuck to the words as much as possible.

Q: Going to work with a two-time Oscar winner, especially someone as young as Hilary, where is your head and what do you think she’s going to be like and what did you discover she really was like?

IE: Honestly, watching her career and seeing those great performances that she’s done, I realized that she has to be someone who is dedicated to her work so I was expecting someone who was dedicated to their work. I can be a playful guy or a relaxed guy, but I was going in there… I think the day of, I was like ‘okay’ and looking in the mirror, ‘working with Hilary Swank today, don’t be a goofball, don’t mess around today, get your lines right, otherwise it’s not going to look good.’ But she turned out to be very, very nice, very charismatic, very caring for her crew, very professional.

Q: How are you with grubs and locusts and frogs and other creep crawly creatures?

IE: I hate locusts with a real passion. I mean honestly they’re about this big [demonstrates] and they fly and you know that’s terrifying. That’s really terrifying. There’s a scene where the whole screen fills up with these bugs and they’re at the screen and then my hands come through, so we actually had to shoot that in this box full of locusts, and then the camera was underneath and I had to dig them out. ‘Oh man!’ So if you’re the crew and you’re filming me and there’s a camera there, I had to throw them at the crew and I was like… So there’s all these guys down and I could see out of my peripheral and they were all hating this, these flying things everywhere.

Q: Were there digital frogs or were there guys on cranes throwing frogs?

IE: [Laughs] Man, okay, they were real frogs, but they were real plastic frogs. And yes, there were guys in the bayous that were like sort of lobbing these things down.

Q: With the bugs, do you have to be careful not to hurt them while you’re acting?

IE: Yeah, absolutely, which is hard for me, because I just want to squash them. But I didn’t, I didn’t, because they’re huge, you know.

Q: Was digging through the locusts probably the grossest parts that you had to shoot or was there something more disgusting.

IE: Well, the first assistant director, Cliff… We’re all looking at these locusts, we’re about to shoot this, and all the guys and girls are ‘eeewww’ so I say ‘Cliff, I’ll give you $50 if you put that in your mouth,’ and oh yeah, he takes one and puts it in his mouth [demonstrates], and it’s in his mouth and it’s crawling like this and it’s the grossest thing I’ve ever seen. He didn’t kill it. He just took it out and it was like that.

Q: On the level of grossness, how does this compare with 28 Weeks Later?

IE: [Laughs] Well, in that film I don’t see anything like what I see in The Reaping at all. My character is confined in a bunker. I play a general in that movie, and so my character stays in his bunker and watches everything from monitors. So I really didn’t get to see any of the zombie work and I was a bit mad about that.

Q: Did you get to jump in on the action at any point?

IE: No, dude, no I just stay by the red telephone, like ‘Kill them all!’

Q: Are you a horror movie guy?

IE: No, I’m not into it. I’m not into it. Honestly, my imagination is too vivid, you know, so I take it with me and it stays with me for a couple of days in my apartment freaking me out so I can’t… I was just saying I was watching Seven the other day and ah man, that movie just really, really… But this, when I saw this, this stayed with me for a different reason. It just made me think. It wasn’t so much that it freaked me out or scared me. There were very scary moments but it really made me think. It’s been a year since I did it, so seeing it for the first time, seeing it really fresh, I was like ‘whoa, that’s pretty deep.’ I’m a spiritual guy myself so watching that was…

Q: What kind of director is Hopkins? Is he an actor’s director or is he more of a technical guy?

IE: He’s actually a really great balance of the two. Yeah, he’s very, very technical. He knows exactly what he wants and how to do it. He’s been filmmaking for a long time. But he really does have a lot of patience for actors and he really wants the actors to have the environment that they need to make whatever the scene is real. He’s very funny [laughs], he’s hilarious, he’s got a real funny sense of humor, and he’s an all around nice guy. I like him. He’s a Brit. [Laughs] So we had a good time.

Q: When you were wading around in the river, was that actually red? Did they make it red for you or was that a trick that they added later?

IE: Actually some of it was. They had this gooey gunk stuff. In this small section of the river that we were actually shooting -- which was a real bayou and they had to get rid of the crocodiles, otherwise I wasn’t doing it -- they had real like tons of this gunk in there. I fell into it as well, and you don’t see it on film, but I really fell in.

Q: Does it stain?

IE: Yeah, it was real, it was real fake blood, but there was lots of it in this water.

Q: How humid was it?

IE: Very. The weather was unbelievably hot. We were in Baton Rouge. That’s where we were staying. You could cut the air with a knife it was so warm. I liked the heat though, mind you. I liked the heat.

Q: Was the kissing of the cross your idea or was that in the script?

IE: It was mine. It was something that I picked up. A friend of mind does that all the time, has a cross, and just at moments, personal moments or whatever, he just kisses it and so it was something that I implemented.

Q: Where do you call home these days?

IE: My suitcase, really, honestly. I’m born in London, raised in London, but lived in New York for a long time, and now I’m sort of in between New York and L.A. But I travel a lot and I just got back from London. I work there maybe twice a year so [laughs] I really don’t have a home. I’m always traveling which is interesting. Most of my career I sort of worked in a television show and I’ve been sort of located in one spot, and now I’m finding myself traveling a lot which is interesting.

Q: Like a lot of British actors, do you want to be on "Doctors”?

IE: [Laughs] No.

Q: No "Doctors”?

IE: Nah. Do you like that show?

Q: I do.

IE: Do you know that show has been around for years, dude.

Q: I know, I watched it with Tom Baker when I was a kid.

IE: Oh wow.

Q: I like the new Doctors even better.

IE: Do they have the dialects [gives impression] ‘we are very doctor…’?

Q: Yeah, they do.

IE: You can erase that impression, mind you. That was terrible.

Q: On 28 Weeks Later, did Danny Boyle bring you in on that or did you go through an audition process with Juan Carlos?

IE: No, Danny Boyle and Juan Carlos had made their decision about me coming in and doing that, so it was a pretty smooth sailing process, and you know, it was a good part in a very interesting film. That genre has been done before, but these guys do it really well and I think the difference between I and II -- there isn’t that much difference -- it’s just continuity and a really smooth transition from one story to another.

Q: Can you talk about your experience filming in Baton Rouge and what was going on in that region while you guys were shooting?

IE: Well, you know, it was obviously… They do a lot of filming down there so Baton Rouge was used to the idea of film crews. I’d never been there before. I thought it was great. We had an amazing team of people working on it. And of course, you know, we went through the two hurricanes which did for us and that region band everyone together. So when we took our three week hiatus and came back, we were just so moved by what was going on around us that it made the pages and the film work just seem so much more relevant. Talk about acts of God and here we are doing The Reaping, so it was a really interesting experience. I will be friends with the team on this film forever I believe because we just went through a lot. Hilary is great, Stephen, and Sophia Robb, everyone just really pulled together on it.

Q: What was it like when you went back after the break? Was it hard to go back?

IE: Yeah, yeah, it was. There was a sense of hey, look, we’re doing something that is just filmmaking and there are people down the road that are in complete turmoil. But we dedicated time to that part of the country and it didn’t seem right to just leave. It sounds right to just continue.

Q: What do you think it says about human nature the fact that there are obviously real people like your character who go around disproving miracles, and while most of the time they are scientifically disproved, people still believe in miracles.

IE: I think it says that we as a race want to believe in something higher than ourselves. I think that that’s – whether some people don’t or some people do – but I think generally we want to. But it also suggests that there are people that will do anything to convince people that there is a God using so-called miracles and that part of our nature as human beings really doesn’t appeal to me. You know the fact that someone would go out of their way to make Jesus appear on the wall seems wicked and manipulative. But I think that we as human beings want to believe in some higher being and spirituality.

Q: Your character is more of an investigator than a disprover. She’s the one who’s carrying all the baggage, wouldn’t you say?

IE: Yeah, I’d say that his investigation is to prove God exists, you know, scientifically. So they go on these operations and his intention is ‘this could be the one’ and her intention is ‘hey, I already know that this is another hoax.’ I wouldn’t put him down to just being an investigator only because he is a religious man who has seen in his opinion a miracle in his own right having survived near death. So I think that when in the data he finds a miracle, that’s his whole calling and it’s real.

Q: You mentioned earlier that you consider yourself a spiritual person. Where do you fit in regard to your character? Are you similar to him?

IE: No, my spirituality is really sort of private and more of an unorganized spirituality. I’m not into organized religion as much, but I do believe that my spirit will dictate what my life does. I believe in that and I believe in faith.

Q: What would you say to the people who maybe have preconceptions about the film and won’t give it a chance because they think it might put religion in a bad light?

IE: Well I’m not a religious guy but…

Q: …spiritual guy…

IE: Spiritual guy. I would say that this is a good film for skeptics and those that want to hear and see more about something like this. There are stories in the Bible that are very hard to sort of really believe if you like, and I think this movie would be great for them to see and understand from a skeptic’s point of view, i.e. Katherine’s point of view.

Q: Now that American Gangster is done? What are your feelings?

IE: I think it’s going to be great. It’s an amazing team of Denzel [Washington], Russell {Crowe] and Ridley [Scott] and it’s going to be really good. It’s very good.

Q: Thank you.

IE: Thank you guys. Cheers. Appreciate it.

"The Reaping” opens in theaters on April 5^th. I invite you to read my interviews with the rest of the cast.