James Mottram

“I DID a lot of fighting,” grins Idris Elba. “I like to fight.” No, this is not a confession of how he spends his Saturday nights. The Luther star is talking up his latest movie, Bastille Day, a high-velocity action film set on the streets of Paris. With his shaven head, goatee and star-shaped tattoo on his hand, huge muscles bulging beneath his navy jumper, the 43-year-old OBE-winner looks more than capable of handling himself. He’s been into kickboxing for years; now it’s his chance to show it.

Directed by James Watkins, who made the rather more sedate but no less effective movie version of The Woman In Black, Bastille Day casts Elba as Sean Briar, a taciturn CIA agent who is forced to join up with Richard Madden’s pickpocket in an effort to stop a gang terrorising the French capital. The touchstones here are films like 48 Hours and Midnight Run. “It is just a real, grounded approach to a buddy action flick and I thought that was interesting,” says Elba.

Playing a man who punches before he speaks, it’s about as far removed from Elba’s Golden Globe-nominated turn as the iconic leader Nelson Mandela in 2013’s Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom as you could wish to get. But Elba reckons Bastille Day blindsides audiences. “You walk into what you think might be a ‘terrorism’ film about terrorists in the big city and then it takes you on a different journey,” he says. “And I liked that journey.”

We meet just a few days after the Brussels attacks; and given what happened in Paris last year, the timing of Watkins’ movie is ghastly. But Elba, who this year was nominated for a Golden Globe and BAFTA for his terrifying Commandant in Beasts of No Nation, refuses to shy away from the subject. “The truth of the matter is, the film has no real correlation with what’s going on. It just happens to be Paris. This script is four years old and we shot it almost two years ago.”

While Bastille Day’s antagonists have nothing to do with Muslim extremists, Elba refuses to let politics dictate art. “I suspect that we shouldn’t, as filmmakers, veer away from making subjects close to what happens in the real world. That’s the liberty of being an artist, to make what you feel like.” Even so, the sight of Paris under siege during the horror attacks of November 13th last year was horrendous, he says. “It broke our hearts…they embraced us as filmmakers and this was happening to them.”

Whether he likes it or not, Bastille Day also feels like Elba’s perfect audition for playing James Bond. The rumours have been circulating for over a year now, after it was revealed that Amy Pascal, former chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, the studio behind the recent 007 movies, said: “Idris should be the next Bond” in a leaked e-mail. Ever since, the talk has been that Elba will replace Daniel Craig and be the first black actor to play Ian Fleming’s spy.

Elba has grown tired of the speculation; “I’m not speaking to the James Bond people, they are not speaking to me,” he says. But it’s not such a stretch to imagine him in 007’s tux. Indeed, the opening of Bastille Day, as Elba’s character chases Madden’s thief across Parisian rooftops, recalls the parkour stunt that opened Casino Royale. So could he play the role? “I think he could do it, a hundred percent,” says Watkins. “I feel for Idris – it’s not something he can control. But he would be fantastic.”

It would be a remarkable coup for the Hackney-born Elba, whose first professional job was acting on Crimewatch reconstructions, while making ends meet on the night shift at the Ford motor factory in Dagenham, where his Sierra Leone-born father had worked for years. Gradually, in the Nineties, he took bit parts in British television, but it wasn’t until he was cast in 2002 in HBO drama The Wire as drug-dealer Stringer Bell that his career accelerated.

Since then, while continuing to play the multi-award-winning DCI John Luther on TV, a role he still hopes to bring to the big screen, he’s been a Hollywood regular: blockbusters like Thor, Prometheus and Pacific Rim all fill his CV. This summer, he’s playing Krall, a villainous character in the upcoming Star Trek: Beyond, before taking the lead in The Dark Tower, based on the series of Stephen King books, playing Old West gunslinger Roland Deschain – a character originally written as white.

He’s also voicing a sea-lion named Fluke in Finding Dory, the sequel to Pixar’s animated aquatic masterpiece Finding Nemo. Already this year, he’s been heard as the police chief in Disney’s delightful Zootropolis and, this week, you can catch him voicing the tiger Shere Khan in The Jungle Book. A mix of live-action and stunning CGI, inspired by the Disney 1967 cartoon, Elba calls it “a big, unique experience” (a father of two, you suspect it’s a chance for him to make something his kids can see).

When it comes to Elba’s vocal skills, he’s more than just a voiceover artist, though. With a tandem music career – he spins discs all over the world as DJ Driis – he’s also released several records. He can even be heard ‘speak-singing’ at the end of Bastille Day, a tune he produced with Fatboy Slim. “He and I wanted to work together,” Elba explains. “I said, ‘Here’s an opportunity to make something interesting.’ He encouraged me to ‘sping’ on it!” No word yet on when the ‘spingle’ is out.

The Jungle Book opens on Friday. Bastille Day is released on April 22nd.