We know Idris Elba for “The Wire” and “Luther”, less for “Yardie”, his first feature film behind the camera made six years ago.
Idris Elba, we know him for his roles in the series The Wire and Luther or for his performances on the big screen in Prometheus and The Suicide Squad. But what you may not know is that the Briton has directed one film, and only one: it was in 2008 with Yardie!
With Yardie, Idris Elba, who lied to get his role in The Wire, signs a solid revenge thriller which shows him frankly at ease behind a camera.
Adapted from the eponymous novel by Victor Headley published in 1992, the film tells the story of a cocaine deliveryman orphaned by his older brother who, in the 1980s, must bring a kilo of merchandise from Jamaica to London. But instead of taking it to his employer as planned, he decides to sell it himself in the streets of the English capital.
If Idris Elba set his sights on Yardie to embark on directing, it was because he felt a personal connection with the story of the novel. “I worked on adapting this book for five years before it came to fruition, so it was a long, slow process towards completion”, he confided in 2019 to the Entertainment Weekly site.
“It’s a book I read when I was a teenager and I could relate to the character’s struggles.”
A personal connection for Idris Elba
“He’s a boy who’s in London, there’s this gang culture”continues the Briton, born in the British city. “It’s not like that anymore, but back then, the confrontations between the Yardies (slang word designating the inhabitants of the slums of Trenchtown, one of the districts of Kingston, capital of Jamaica, editor’s note) and the police were important, and all young black teenagers could relate to what was happening.
And then of course, the main character is a young DJ, and it’s a world I was very immersed in when I was 16.”
Led by the very convincing Aml Ameen, this Yardi directly released on VOD also allows us to find in the cast the excellent Stephen Graham (Snatch, Boardwalk Empire, The Irishman) in the role of a powerful London drug lord.
The trailer for the recent Apple TV+ series “Hijack”, led by Idris Elba: