Idris Elba: life after 'Stringer' Bell

Idris Elba strides into the room, a tall, fine-looking man in Ray-Bans and sharp coat, accompanied by a small entourage. He shakes hands, gives a cool smile and disappears. As a first impression, it's low key, but high status, like a Hollywood version of his cold-as-ice character in The Wire, "Stringer" Bell. The man has presence.

But when we sit down for our chat, perched on teeny chairs in a space the size of a cupboard, Elba is – phew – far more approachable. "Sorry about these, I've got an eye infection," he says about the shades, before removing them; then he gets sweetly excited by my recording device: "Let's have a look: I love gadgets!"

He has a deep, melodious voice, with an accent that switches between east London and east coast US. Coat off, he's dressed in cap, jeans and Bob Marley T-shirt; heavy silver jewellery, arms decorated with tattoos. Beautiful, but a geezer, not a gangster.

Idris is here because he wants us to forget The Wire. Not completely, of course – we wouldn't be talking to him if it wasn't for his mesmerising performance in that brilliant series – but we need to park our Stringer obsession; move on, as he has. After all, box-set fans, it started in 2002. Since then, Elba has been in umpteen films, including 28 Weeks Later, Rock'n'Rolla and Obsessed, with Beyoncé, as well as the US version of The Office. He's great in all of them, effortlessly brilliant: seeming to do very little, while expressing a lot.

Currently, he's filming the lead in a new BBC cop series called Luther, is due to start Kenneth Branagh's Thor and has two blockbusters coming out this year (Takers, The Losers), as well as UK film Legacy, for which he combines acting with executive producing.

Then there's his musical career. Idris Elba, under his DJ name Driis, has recorded a five-song EP called High Class Problems Vol 1. To which we can only say: Uh-oh.

"Yeah, I know, any time you hear an actor say, 'I do music', you cringe," he laughs. "But I want to be gradual with my music. I want to earn my stripes."

To be fair, Elba has been earning his musical stripes for almost half his life. In his early 20s, before his acting took off, he had a successful pirate radio show in London, having started DJing at the age of 14. In 2006, he released the Big Man EP, which had a hip-hop feel. Since then, Angie Stone has recorded one of his songs, his tunes have featured on film soundtracks and he provided the intro to Jay-Z's American Gangster album.

Not bad for a side project. Notably, most of his own music has been made post-Wire: there's a funny freestyle track on YouTube where he raps: "By killing Stringer, they made Driis." He makes an "oh no" face when I mention it.

"That was around two, three years ago. It's what happens when you have a studio at your house and you press 'Send' at the end and then go, Hold on, should I have done that? It wasn't serious."

Idris is keen to be taken seriously when it comes to his music, partly because he's a bit shy about it: "For sure, I'm scared of people laughing." With music, he feels exposed: no script or director to hide behind, just him and his songs. And his subject matter is – steady on, ladies – love. "Best That I Can" – "a letter to an ex-girlfriend" – is Idris explaining that he's trying his best within a relationship; "Private Garden" is him trying to win over a woman who's been hurt.

Quite surprising, but then this is a surprising EP, mostly because it's pretty good. Smooth and confident, it takes in reggae, soul, hip-hop. There are samples and beats throughout, but, overall, the sound is warm, mature hip-hop soul, emphatically not gangsta rap. And Driis can sing.

"I didn't really think I could," he admits, "until I thought, I need someone to do that hook here, so I'll just sing it. Recently, I've been going to a voice coach and he said, 'I hear what you're doing, but technically you're doing it all wrong.' So I'm starting to sing the right way and that's building my confidence. I'm not there yet though – I've been rehearsing with a live band and at first they were like, We can't hear you! I was like, That's because I wrote this in a dark room in my house with no one else there and here you all are…"

Music has always been important to him – his uncle was a DJ, his dad loved records – and Idris gets excited when he recalls doing his pirate show in the early 90s. "It was prime time on Climax FM, between 6 and 8 on a Saturday. I was really ambitious, so I was innovative. I was one of the first DJs to do live calls, 'cos I found this phone device that would pick up other people's voices. We used to do prank calls, I made my own beds [backing tracks] for the show and I was going to New York and picking all this fresh music. I thought, If this acting doesn't work out I'm going to be all right."

Even now Elba, who's on Twitter a lot, often tweets about tracks he's into, from grime to soulful house. He talks easily about which artists get the crowd going when he DJs (Flo Rida, Jay-Z), and out of four tattoos he shows me, two are music-based. One, which I thought was a space invader, turns out to be a headshell (the needle that goes on a record); the other is a quote from a track by roots reggae kings Culture: "This Train Carries No Wrongdoers."

But will his fans accept his new job? In the UK, we like our idols to stay in their boxes; we're suspicious of jacks of all trades, we don't think they're expert enough. And when it comes to music and acting, there's a problem with authenticity. Being for real is fundamental to contemporary music, whereas acting, obviously, is all about faking.

Plus, though you don't want to overstate it, there's still the Wire factor. Its fans are so hardcore that what they really want is for Elba to play Stringer over and over until he drops dead for real. How will they react to his music? Especially as it's proud to show its loving side. "I'm a fan of the love song genre, for sure. I grew up on those guys like the Heptones and the Mighty Diamonds, trying to tell the audience I'm cool, 'cos I'm a lover and the ladies love that. That's lost now, it's more like you have to be a player these days. There's no romance."

Idris is so keen on romance that he almost comes a cropper with it: on "Extraordinary Love", one of the EP tracks, he seems to be singing, live, in a nightclub, to a "girl in a black dress". It sounds for real, because the crowd sounds real, but it can't be, because he's singing about taking a train every day for work. He says it's a "combination": he was in a studio in Puerto Rico and there was a small audience. "The truth is, I had a bottle of Jack and a cigarette and I just made up this story, I improvised. That's what actors do. And we listened back and I was like, I just sound drunk and stupid, but Hanif, who produced the song, liked it."

Your accent is all over the place in that song. "That actually falls into why I'm doing music. As an actor, you're trained to do the right thing, be politically correct, say your lines, say the right thing about the people you're working with… and as a musician you get to say what the fuck you want. I have a hybrid accent – my accent switches all the time. So why shouldn't I use it? It's a true representation of who I am."

He is indeed a hybrid. On the one hand, he's a cheeky London bloke, social and up for a laugh (according to my Luther sources, he's a man for a full-on Saturday night). On the other, he's a true, American-style professional: smooth, unafraid to self-promote, a little closed. When I listen back to the interview, I realise that, at one point, I annoy him (by, surprise, going on about The Wire), but he's charming enough to keep his cool and expertly turn the chat back to music.

And he's discreet about his love life. Though Elba split from the mother of his eight-year-old daughter, Isan, a long time back, he says he's now "a little bit more involved" with a woman and they live in Miami.

"She's a friend and we enjoy each other's company and there's no drama," he offers. "I've always had a female audience and they're very loyal; they stay with you through the ups and downs of your career. But being a man, a red-blooded male, they're your Kryptonite. They give you a hug and you're like, You've got to stay away from me, you're going to get me into trouble! Having a girlfriend is like having insurance… I'm going to be shot for saying that now."

Perhaps it's no surprise that Idris is keen on privacy. He's been a little burnt by previous press, with one US film reviewer making weird comparisons between his performance in Obsessed and OJ Simpson, and much emphasis from the British media on his supposedly rough past and how it parallels The Wire.

Actually, his young life was no different from that of most inner-city kids. Born on 6 September 1972, he was an only child, with an active imagination, and parents who believed in hard work. His mum and dad, Eve and Winston, met in west Africa and then moved to east London in the early 70s; Idris was born a year after his mum arrived. Winston worked at the Ford factory in Dagenham, Eve had a clerical job.

Though he had a few scuffles when he was young – his first name was actually Idrissa, which must have been tricky – when he moved up from primary to secondary school, he found life easier. He'd been quite shy before, popular but not one of the cool kids. But then he went to school in a different area – Canning Town, as opposed to Hackney. "When I showed up there, I had an instant status. Just based on the fact that I was bigger than everyone else. It meant that I was a leader. My confidence went up and then I wanted to make the best of it; it gave me lots of opportunities."

He thinks of this time as a "blueprint" for the way he approaches life as an adult.

"Because I was big, I didn't have to listen to anyone doubting me. I was just considered good at football or whatever, there were no questions about it. And in my career now, I don't listen to critics, 'cos it starts to shake my confidence. What gives me the right to do music? If I listen to that, I won't do it. So instead I'm like, I'm going to go for it, and that definitely stems from that time. I suddenly became a leader and I didn't wait for my ideas to be endorsed."

It wasn't until his mid-teens that Idris came across acting. He found he was naturally good at it – "I would disappear into the character" – and didn't suffer from the inhibitions of many of his peers. That confidence again, increased by the fact that, as an only child, he was the butt of his parents' jokes. His parents would say, You can't do that, and Idris would instantly try and prove them wrong.

"I could see they were like, Actors don't work much, they don't get paid, come on man, we've not raised you to be lazy. I had to show them I was good at it. But I was strong-headed; if I'm going to do something, I'm doing it and I will face the consequences, whether it gets me a beating or whatever."

That determination saw Elba get a job, at 16, as a stagehand in Barking, saw him apply to the Prince's Trust for a grant so he could go the National Youth Theatre, got him through his time working at Ford (he played Sam Cooke every day in his headphones) and inspired him to venture to New York in his early 20s. He did a couple of Lee Strasberg classes, picked up new music and eventually moved to the US when he was 26.

"For an actor, the difference in America isn't in the work, it's in the market place. I hate the term 'black actor' – an actor is an actor, and in America there are a lot more stories being told, it's a bigger market place and so African-American culture is represented. Here, the Afro-Caribbean culture isn't as represented on screen, unless it's an Afro-Caribbean story. Though it's getting better – here I am leading Luther and I was one of many actors, white and black, who were in the running for that."

The US suited – and suits – Idris's drive and ambition, though even there he had to overcome prejudice. When he auditioned for The Wire, he pretended to be from Brooklyn: "I knew they wouldn't give me the part if they knew I was English. I transformed myself for them so they could see I could do the job."

He went for Avon Barksdale, and got Stringer. "He actually reminded me of people I grew up with who had to play in the sidelines. You were dealing with Avon, who's a Don Corleone type, and Stringer's his consigliere. We all grew up with the famous portrayals by De Niro and all those guys who got to do cool shit as gangsters. And here was this African-American team of fellers in Baltimore and they weren't getting caught."

Though he's still happy to talk about the show – he jokes that he's going to open a bar with Dominic West called The Stringer and McNulty ("'A place where cops and robbers can drink in peace' – that's our slogan") – he never watches The Wire because he thinks it would discourage him from whatever he's working on today, whether acting or music. He knows how much it can overshadow.

"Because I think you're looking at Idris right now but, I don't know, maybe you're just seeing Stringer… it's too limiting, I want to surprise people. I want you to not expect what I do. I want you to go, Oh, OK, I don't know who you are now! I love that, I love that…"

Is that what you want people to take from your music?

"Well, I would like people to enjoy it, first. But I'd also like them to think, This guy, I've heard of him from The Wire, but I still don't know who he is and what he's doing, I'll keep an eye out for what he's doing next, because I might learn something about what I can do myself.

"I know that sounds pretentious and like, Yeah, I'm the best, but I just love the idea that people can be inspired by someone that's not afraid to try things. It's all out there. We use 12% of our brain and the rest of it just sits there hanging about. We should use it."