Idris Elba Gets Emotional About the Kid Who Was Not His Son

By Dodai Stewart | September 19, 2013 | 9:10pm

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Idris Elba is looking goooooood on the October cover of GQ, and inside, he talks about the incident in which he fell in love with a woman in Florida, she became pregnant and they had a child, and he was thrilled to have a son… Until a paternity test revealed Elba was not the father.

“You know, the truth is—like, even admitting it, I’ll probably get laughed at for the rest of my life. But it is just tragic, and it happened.” He looks directly at me when he says this. “But I wasn’t knocked out. I stood right the fuck back up, and I ain’t aiming to take another punch in the face ever again. Do you understand what I’m saying? It happened to me. I moved on.”

In a paradoxical way, he says, it was freeing. “I’ve not been an angel in my life, either—do you know what I’m saying? So to a certain extent, what goes around comes around. But for me in the future, I’m about being comfortable. That’s it.”

This incident actually fueled his acting: While filming the pilot of Luther in 2010:

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…There was this scene in the script: Luther’s married but separated from his wife, played by the actress Indira Varma. He hopes to reconcile, only to find out that she’s moved on and is dating another man. The script called for a furious Luther to, among other things, slam a door.

“And you have to understand, I had just gone through the worst thing in my life with, you know…”

[The Florida thing.]

“Yeah. So Luther came at a time where, you know, it was gaga therapy for me, man. Stupid. I was like, ‘I’m going in…’ And that is what I fucking did. I’ll tell you: I did that take, and I remember the room…Indira Varma, the beautiful Indian actress—beautiful girl… The crew were at this end of the room, all packed in. Indira was over there. And I fucking let go. Like, all kinds of shit happened in my head. I mean—blitz. Fucked up this door, I mean fucked this fucking door up. The emotion was going so long after the fucking actual scene was ended that everyone sat in silence. Indira was in fucking tears; I was in tears.”

The camera was still rolling. No one knew what to do. The silence just kept going. And then, finally, someone called, “Cut.”

More great quotes — including his thoughts about Stringer Bell and The Wire — and pictures here. And you can listen to him and his foxy foxy accent in the video below.