Before he was the eponymous tortured detective in Luther, before he was a regal Nelson Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom, before he was even The Wealth of Nations-toting drug kingpin Stringer Bell in The Wire, Idris Elba was a schoolboy on a bus in east London being pelted with eggs by racists.
“My school, Trinity, was just off the Barking Road, which would take all the National Front supporters to the football at West Ham,” he remembers, leaning forward on a sofa in a production office, in London’s Holborn, that smells of expensive candles and industriousness.
The Collected Works of Kevin EG Perry 