I'm rebelling against being handed a career, like, 'You're the next this; you're the next that.' I'm not the next anything, I'm the first me. I can't be myself, I can't just be Idris Elba. But that's just the nature of the business.

Even when I went to America I didn't work for four years. It wasn't like I came to New York and it was the land of milk and honey. It was just as much of a hard graft. But there's a lot more opportunity nowadays across the board for actors, no matter what color you are, with the Internet and small productions.

The less I talk about being black, the better.

My Father always told me that a fool at 40 is a fool for life.

It's really funny because the same people who loved me as Stringer Bell were the same people that were watching Daddy's Little Girls literally in tears.

If you go to Africa and you're white, you're probably not going to get that much work either. But the fact is that there is a longer history of black integration in the U.S. I don't have any resentment about this: I did the maths, calculated it against my ambition and decided to leave England.

[Sometimes] I sit in front of my [gaming] console with my headphones on and I play. I love that. It's a nice form of escapism.