Idris Elba gives such an action-packed performance in Bastille Day that it prompted one leading betting firm in the UK to shorten the odds on the Londoner becoming the next James Bond.
He dismisses such talk when we meet to discuss the movie. However, its director, James Watkins (The Woman in Black), is much more enthusiastic.
“He would be a fantastic Bond,” he says. “He can play the brute-in-the-suit and he can also play the suave sophisticate.”
Elba's recent performances in animated hits Zootopia and The Jungle Book also prove he has impressive vocal range.
“I make these films because I’ve got children and they love animation, and their friends are like: ‘Hey, that’s your dad!’ – I selfishly love that little moment,” says Elba, laughing.
Bastille Day is definitely not for kids. Elba plays maverick CIA agent Sean Briar, who teams up with a pickpocket – played by Richard Madden, best known as Robb Stark in Game of Thrones – to uncover a criminal conspiracy in Paris.
Watkins envisaged the film as a throwback to his favourite 1970s crime thrillers, and views Briar as being in the same mould as the granite-like characters portrayed by the likes of Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman and Lee Marvin.
“Idris is the wall,” he says, “and Richard is this little terrier, nipping at him.”
Elba certainly doesn’t have the bearing of a man who is easily intimidated, which may come from having to learn to stand his ground as a youth. When his family moved from Hackney to Canning Town “there was a lot more violence and kids were getting bullied on the street,” he says, “so I found myself fighting a lot. It was the colour of my skin that attracted them.”
Watkins’s retro approach to making the film recalls a time where the “actors were tougher and doing their own stunts,” says Elba. For him and Madden, this meant training for six weeks to perform a hair-raising chase along a false roof built atop a seven-storey department store. This was pure old-school filmmaking.
“With CGI, you can do everything: break the laws of physics and jump out of a window and grab a helicopter, and it gets nonsense,” says Watkins. “I thought with this notion of these guys running across a very high rooftop at high speed, there’s a lot of very real jeopardy in a kind of low-fi way. I’m scared of heights, so I wanted a vertiginous sense. And I wanted that to come through.”
Despite the influence of the past on the filmmaking, the plot is right up to date, with the internet playing a key role as a tool used by different groups to exploit tensions in Paris. In this regard, Bastille Day feels very modern, tapping into the volatile world of social media and hashtag activism.
For actors and celebrities, too, social media can be a minefield, where a single comment can explode in your face.
“Don’t drunk tweet” is Elba’s pithy advice.
Madden says it has helped him get exposure for his work and “if I can fire off a tweet that helps a charity or helps a filmmaker get his next gig, then I want to use that”.
His mood darkens, though, when I ask whether things ever get blown out of proportion.
“Oh yeah, things get absolutely blown out of proportion,” he says.
Possibly thinking about angry tweets that model-turned-actress Cara Delevingne sent in response to comments Madden reportedly made about her last year, he adds: “You get misquoted and then it all turns to a big bag of s***.
“But we mustn’t focus on the negative,” he adds, laughing grimly.
This must also be the hope of everyone involved in Bastille Day. A bomb blast in the film that sets the plot in motion raises the spectre of terrorism – and evokes memories of the real-life massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, just weeks after filming finished in Paris.
Watkins shifts uncomfortably in his chair when asked whether these terrible events forced him to make any changes in the editing room.
“The inciting incident at the beginning of the film, the explosion, I didn’t want to make more of that than needed to be made of that,” he says. “I wanted to leave that behind. I think the film is really not about that.
“Tonally, the film is these guys on this journey, and there’s a lightness in places within the film, as well as a toughness and the violence.”
Watkins just wanted it to be a fun action movie for the Friday night crowd, with some ideas “smuggled in”. In that, he’s largely succeeded.
Bastille Day is in cinemas on Thursday, April 28
