Damson Idris: the British star making waves in the US
In the sun-warmed window seat of a Fitzrovia members’ club, Damson Idris is taking me on a tour through the alternate universe of his American megastardom.
There was the time when Mary J Blige spotted him and let out a high-pitched, starstruck shriek. There have been appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live and Good Morning America that have gone viral. There is the strange, simple fact that, in Los Angeles, his face is ‘basically on posters the size of buildings’. But, perhaps ranked above all of these, is the moment when he met Jay-Z. All the billionaire rapper wanted to do was talk about Idris’s role in Snowfall, the hit US show that has made him a household name across the pond.
‘He told me that he binged Snowfall during the On the Run II tour,’ says Idris, with a broad, satisfied grin. ‘And that apparently Beyoncé couldn’t believe I was actually British.’
If you’re thinking, ‘Damson who?’, you’re probably not alone. In London, where Idris was born, he’s rarely recognised (he was recently surprised that someone stopped him at Currys PC World on Old Kent Road). But, at 28, Idris has been leading a strange double life over the past few years; the recognisable figurehead of a cult hit in the US, a relatively anonymous rising star in the UK.
His next role, however, in British film Farming, out next month, looks set to catapult him into the limelight over here, too. Based on the redemptive life story of debut writer-director Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Farming is the tale of Eni (Idris), a young Nigerian boy brought up by white working-class foster parents in 1980s Essex. Co-starring Kate Beckinsale and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (as, respectively, Eni’s foster mother and inspirational teacher), it’s an uncomfortable watch: Eni is so traumatised by prejudice that he falls in with a local band of racist skinheads. Farming doesn’t just hint that Idris is a new talent to watch; it announces him as screen’s new star with the force of a brick hurled through a window. That has only been cemented by a Best Performance in a British Film award at June’s Edinburgh Film Festival.
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‘When I met Adewale and he told me the story, I was hooked before I even saw a script,’ explains Idris when we sit down. Today, he has a healthy glow (smartly dressed in a pine green turtleneck and wreathed in expensive-smelling cologne) and radiates an easy, chat-show charm. But to fully transform into Eni, he starved (‘I was living off two apples a day’), isolated himself (‘me and Kate are partying in LA now but throughout filming our relationship was non-existent’) and, as he puts it, gave Adewale his ‘blood and soul’. ‘I had to be totally at his disposal,’ he adds. ‘I had to understand why Eni wanted to put talcum powder on his body [to appear white], why he wanted to scrub off his skin.’ And there were other surprising difficulties that arose from working with a script littered with racist slurs. ‘I pleaded with the actors playing the skins to stop f***ing apologising,’ he says, with a laugh. ‘Because after every scene they’d come up to me and be like, “Damson, I’m sorry. Are you all right? I’m sorry I kicked you in the face.”’
As is probably obvious from Idris’s self-assured manner, one of the biggest challenges of Farming was playing someone without confidence or pride in their identity; someone who didn’t grow up in multicultural London, uplifted by other black people. ‘I love myself,’ he says, with another grin. ‘And so, above all things, this was about teaching myself self-hate.’ Born in Peckham in 1991 as the youngest of six children — ‘My eldest brother is 45, so I’m the mistake,’ he laughs — Idris (his first name at birth was Adamson, but his family would call him Damson) was raised by a Nigerian immigrant single mother, but his upbringing couldn’t have been less like Eni’s. ‘It was a loving family but we were dirt poor,’ he says, pouring tea from his pot. ‘It was roaches, 23 different carpets in the house and the mattress that your mum took from outside so the bottom of it is still pissy. But I didn’t notice all those things when I was a kid because everyone in my community lived the same way. There was no jealousy or longing for what I saw on social media.’
He dreamed, initially, of being a footballer and had trials at Charlton Athletic before injury and his sister’s disparaging view of sports science (his preferred next step at university) led him to study theatre, film and television at Brunel. Scouted as an undergraduate by the actor Cathy Tyson, he soon found himself performing in the 2012 play Pandora’s Box at the Arcola Theatre and under the wing of super-agent and Identity School of Acting impresario Femi Oguns, the man partly responsible for the success of John Boyega. Strangely, Idris was very nearly the Peckham-raised actor taking a career-making trip to a galaxy far, far away.
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‘I auditioned for Star Wars a million times and there were whispers that John was choosing between that and Terminator,’ he says, smile still flashing. ‘The final audition with JJ Abrams, Kathleen [Kennedy, producer] and Nina Gold [casting director] seemed to go swimmingly, but it just didn’t go my way, man. And that role was made for [John]. Anyone who knows him knows he’s been swinging a lightsaber for many years.’
Idris’s moment in a big-ticket franchise with an action figure tie-in will almost certainly come. But his near-miss with Star Wars in 2014 meant he was free the following year to answer the call of the late John Singleton and win the lead role in Snowfall. In the show (which airs on BBC Two in the UK and was recently renewed for a fourth series), Idris plays Franklin Saint, a young South Central kid who becomes an accidental kingpin at the advent of the crack cocaine epidemic in early 1980s Los Angeles. Both Idris’s nuanced portrayal and eerily good American accent have won him plenty of admirers, many of whom haven’t yet twigged he’s from London. ‘I did an episode of Black Mirror and people were tweeting saying, “Man, Damson Idris really knows how to do a good British accent,”’ he says.
The future looks sparkling, but if you scan Idris’s Twitter account, there is a noticeable wrinkle of annoyance that Snowfall — despite critical approval, strong US ratings and an enthusiastic audience of fans ranging from Samuel L Jackson to, yes, Jay-Z and Beyoncé — hasn’t garnered the same level of awards recognition or widespread attention as, say, Game of Thrones. Does he have a theory about why? ‘It’s a touchy subject,’ he says. ‘But I think people assume that a show which contains violence and has a black lead is stereotypical, so they don’t watch it. And the problem with that is, they need to understand that there are people who live these lives. And shows like Snowfall, or even Top Boy, don’t stereotypically display this. These are three dimensional characters going through the same issues and problems just like you. They laugh, they cry, they love, they hate.’
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This idea of an uncomfortable mirror brings us back to Farming, which — particularly in a scene that features Charlottesville-style tiki torches — suggests the 1980s-era intolerance depicted in the film may not be as far away as we’d all like to think. ‘We have a lot of healing and growing to do as a nation and as people,’ he says. ‘People talk about Brexit and Trump, but these attitudes were always there. These people were always racist and [figures like Trump] are just fanning the flame. This is what we need to understand. How do we all come together and integrate so that we heal the minds of those who haven’t changed?’
Idris, for his part, is looking to pick roles that show black people ‘can be flawed characters, just like Walter White’. Currently, he’s hopping between his south London home and Budapest, where he is filming Outside the Wire, a militaristic sci-fi blockbuster for Netflix, with Avengers star Anthony Mackie. But, when quizzed about his professional plans, Idris, who has a stated love of Louis Vuitton, is more keen to talk about his serious devotion to fashion and love of ‘wearing cool suits’.
‘I really want to be an example of pristine taste for young people,’ he says, before waiting a beat. ‘And I’m just planting the seed to play Bond basically.’ He laughs again, and, it should be noted, the suggestion he may one day inherit 007’s tux is offered up as a joke. But if there’s one thing Damson Idris has proven — whether charming half of Hollywood or lighting up the screen with an award-winning depiction of one man’s violent anger — his is a talent that demands to be taken seriously.
‘Farming’ is released on 11 October
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