Welcome to our collection of Idris Elba Quotes! Idris Elba is an English actor, producer, director, singer, rapper, and DJ. He is best known for his roles in the acclaimed films The Wire, Beasts of No Nation, and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. He has also starred in many successful television series such as Luther and The Office. Here you will find some of his most inspiring and thought-provoking quotes.
Inspirational Idris Elba quotes
◼“I’m an ambitious person. I never consider myself in competition with anyone, and I’m not saying that from an arrogant standpoint, it’s just that my journey started so, so long ago, and I’m still on it and I won’t stand still.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m never shaken or stirred.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m not afraid to fail. I’m not afraid to fall over and make a mistake. That often cripples people on the onset of getting into anything.” – Idris Elba
◼“It turns out that you make your own luck but you work hard to keep it.” – Idris Elba
◼“Know what your target is, don’t guess it…if you don’t know what your targets are you’re never going to get there.” – Idris Elba
“Waking up in truth is so much better than living in a lie.” – Idris Elba
Idris Elba quotes about acting
◼“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.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’d rather a young black actor read about success as opposed to how tough it was. I get these roles because I can act and that’s it. Hopefully that’s it.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’ve always had ambition, and the acting was successful and put my name on the map, but it was never the plan to stop there.” – Idris Elba
◼“There’s the argument that you can relate to someone who’s completely unrelatable. In the way that a director shows you his imagination on a film, then I get to show you my imagination in a big dumb character.” – Idris Elba
◼“When I look at my body of work, I’ve played a lot of characters who are morally conflicted – ‘I’m right, no I’m wrong, I don’t know what to do!’ I want to play more characters who don’t care as much, and who aren’t as measured. They are what they are, no apologies.” – Idris Elba
◼“You know, film is the ultimate goal in an actor’s career. I mean, I still love TV. I have my feet firmly stamped in it. But my opportunities have been bigger and better.” – Idris Elba
Idris Elba quotes about music
◼“Are there differences between black actors’ opportunities and white actors’ opportunities? Yes, there are. It’s been said.” – Idris Elba
◼“I did a rendition of ‘Billie Jean’ which is on my Soundcloud. I put it on Twitter, and it got about 3000 hits that day.” – Idris Elba
◼“I lived in America for a long time before I started working as an actor. Some actors show up on set and have never done an American accent before, so they rely on a slew of technical mechanisms. Part of what makes an accent is understanding why people speak that way – you have to understand the culture.” – Idris Elba
◼“I still sing on bits and pieces. Singing’s something that I love to do, but it’s not something that I pursue as a career.” – Idris Elba
◼“I was really ambitious, so I was innovative. I was one of the first DJs to do live calls, ’cause I found this phone device that would pick up other people’s voices.” – Idris Elba
◼“I would never be fearful of any character.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m rebelling against being handed a career, like, ‘you’re the next this; you’re the next that.’ I’m not the next anything, I’m the first me. I can’t be myself, I can’t just be Idris Elba. But that’s just the nature of the business.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’ve always been DJing; it’s just I’m making more of a push for it, making it more public.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’ve been DJing mostly, and most DJs end up producing. That’s just me.” – Idris Elba
◼“If you are going to call a film a ‘black film’ then you have to make a film that represents everyone that’s black, which is almost impossible. That is why white films are not called white films, they are just called ‘films.” – Idris Elba
◼“The long and short of it is that I am now in a position in England to greenlight movies, and that’s really excellent – not high-budget movies, but movies none the less.” – Idris Elba
◼“The role of my agent has just been to get me in the room. If I can get in the room – say the character is just a charming man who lives next door – then I’ll walk in there and be as charming as I can and they will think to themselves, ‘I don’t see why we can’t cast him.’” – Idris Elba
“Whether it’s music or acting, that creativity all comes from the same source.” – Idris Elba
◼“Yeah, I know, any time you hear an actor say, ‘I do music’, you cringe. But I want to be gradual with my music. I want to earn my stripes.” – Idris Elba
Funny Idris Elba quotes
◼“I’m a little sheepish about it. Whenever I meet fans and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re so sexy,’ I just don’t get that. There’s no way one man can be universally sexy.” – Idris Elba
◼“If I was gonna go to jail, I don’t want to go to jail for stealing a bottle of water. I’ll steal that $20 million. At least then it was worth it.” – Idris Elba
◼“It could be Grammy night, Oscar night, whatever – I don’t feel the pressure to be there.” – Idris Elba
◼“The only thing I change mainly is my sneakers. I love sneakers. But everything’s sort of black or jeans. Jeans, always.” – Idris Elba
◼“There’s a fast-track if you can do the networking. For some personalities it works, but for mine it doesn’t.” – Idris Elba
◼“Twenty or 30 years from now, I’m going to be on a beach in Jamaica.” – Idris Elba
Idris Elba quotes about upbringing and family
◼“Africans, we hold on to our youths and whip them into shape.” – Idris Elba
◼“I have one of these bodies. When I was younger, I could never put weight on, and now that I’m a little older, there’s a natural sort of chubbiness coming. But honestly, if I work out for a week, it drops off in no time.” – Idris Elba
◼“I knew that if I wanted to be all I could be, I would have to go to the U.S. It took three years to get the accent right.” – Idris Elba
◼“I love bikes. I used to own one, but I fell off it when I was younger and that was the end of my bike riding days until now.” – Idris Elba
◼“I want to go to Sierra Leone with something – whether it’s some sort of contribution to healthcare, or to the entertainment industry. My cousin is a nurse; we are talking about opening a clinic.” – Idris Elba
◼“I was always a real athletic kid. Then when I got older, I just figured it was part of life to keep training.” – Idris Elba
◼“I was into Spider-Man when I was a kid and that was the only comic I’ve ever read.” – Idris Elba
◼“I wasn’t bad at school, but I was never a bookworm.” – Idris Elba
◼“It’s weird because my parents don’t really understand my business. I get fan mail all day long, but if a piece happens to get to their house, they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, you’ve got a fan! You have to write them back. You have to do it!’” – Idris Elba
◼“My father always told me that a fool at 40 is a fool for life.” – Idris Elba
Idris Elba quotes about previous films
◼“The adrenaline feeling of jumping out of cliffs and bikes and all of that is very specific to the film. In ‘Pac Rim’ I’m not doing that so much. There isn’t that touch stonework for me in it, but there is a lot of action.” – Idris Elba
◼“I think ‘The Wire’ really is relatable. It reflects an ongoing issue across America, about inaccuracies in major cities between rich and the poor and some of the things that go on behind the red tape of council and government bodies.” – Idris Elba
◼“It’s actually quite criminal how ‘The Wire’ was systematically ignored.” – Idris Elba
◼“It was deeply important for me to understand where Mandela came from. Because we know where he was going, and that’s a famous story, but who was he? Where did he come from? What was his upbringing?” – Idris Elba
◼“I’ve never had to explain ‘Prometheus’ to people, ever. Most people get it.” – Idris Elba
◼“It’s really funny because the same people who loved me as Stringer Bell were the same people that were watching ‘Daddy’s Little Girls’ literally in tears.” – Idris Elba
◼“I was cast in ‘Thor’ and I’m cast as a Nordic god. If you know anything about the Nords, they don’t look like me but there you go. I think that’s a sign of the times for the future. I think we will see multi-level casting. I think we will see that, and I think that’s good.” – Idris Elba
◼“I get criticized for taking roles in films like ‘Ghost Rider 2’, but if you look at my resume, dude, I’ve mixed it up as much as I can.” – Idris Elba
◼“What an honor it was to step into the shoes of Nelson Mandela and portray a man who defied odds, broke down barriers, and championed human rights before the eyes of the world.” – Idris Elba
◼“We’re all human beings. Experience is experience, let’s just be honest. Let’s not try and dissect suffering into a race, or whatever you want to call it. We’re all human beings, one way or another. All races have gone through times that are challenging; that’s part of being a human.” – Idris Elba
Best Quotes From Idris Elba Characters
◼“Does my face not remind you of what grown man can do?”
◼“Excuse me. Sorry about that. These bloody things are everywhere.”
◼“He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.”
◼“I don’t only care that you got caught, I care that you got caught for stealing something as stupid as a f*cking TV watch.”
◼“I know who you are, and I see the line that you won’t cross. See, I know what’s on the other side.”
◼“I would have thought all those brains you’ve got, you would have figure out the game I’m playing by now.”
“Life isn’t some cartoon musical where you sing a little song and all your insipid dreams magically come true.”
◼“One coffee does not make us friends.”
◼“This coming from a guy who wears a toilet seat on his head.”
Motivational Idris Elba Quotes To FUEL Your soul
◼“Every single film I’ve done, it’s about the character.” – Idris Elba
◼“Fear nothing. Do what you want to do, but be educated and intelligent and confident about it.” – Idris Elba
◼“I come from an era, in my world, where you just had to define yourself as who you are and what you do.” – Idris Elba
◼“I love to talk about nothing. It’s the only thing I know anything about.” – Idris Elba
◼“I love working. I’m a workaholic and I’m really privileged for some of the jobs I get offered and so I just want to keep going.” – Idris Elba
◼“I try to fit in workouts whenever I can.” – Idris Elba
◼“I was always a real athletic kid. Then when I got older, I just figured it was part of life to keep training.” – Idris Elba
◼“I watch my daughter wanting to be like other kids and getting upset that she’s not. But I always try and instill in her the idea that she’s perfect as she is.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m a veteran of looking at an opportunity and knowing whether it will take me forever or not.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m an ambitious person. I never considered myself in competition with anyone, and I’m not saying that from an arrogant standpoint, It’s just that my journey started so, so long ago, and I’m still on it and I won’t stand still.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m never shaken or stirred.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m rebelling against being handed a career, like, ‘you’re the next this; you’re the next that.’ I’m not the next anything, I’m the first me. I can’t be myself, I can’t just be Idris Elba. But that’s just the nature of the business.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’ve been DJing mostly, and most DJs end up producing. That’s just me.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’ve been poor my whole life, so now I don’t really do things based on money, I do things on authenticity of how I feel.” – Idris Elba
◼“If I can see myself doing it, I can do it. It’s important that people just go, lose the boundaries, lose the conformity and just go for it.” – Idris Elba
◼“It turns out that you make your own luck but you work hard to keep it.” – Idris Elba
◼“Know what your target is, don’t guess it… If you don’t know what your targets are you’re never going to get there.” – Idris Elba
◼“Look whoever you’re talking to in the eyes. Don’t look away. Two reasons: you can tell whether they are lying.
◼“Also, so that they can see whatever you’re saying you mean and you can connect to that person.” – Idris Elba
◼“My definition of bad-ass is that I’m a force of nature and true spirit. I’m self-admitting that, and it sounds vain to say that, but I am.” – Idris Elba
◼“My father always told me that a fool at 40 is a fool for life.” – Idris Elba
◼“Neither of us will touch the sky if we give ourselves boundaries.” – Idris Elba
◼“That’s the thing about people, they always find ways to surprise you.” – Idris Elba
◼“Their confidence becomes shattered in an instant because they don’t have an abundance mindset… When you have an abundance mindset and you get rejected, it’s ok. Because you tell yourself tomorrow ‘I will find 10 other jobs’ or ‘I will find 10 other new people’.” – Idris Elba
◼“There are things that I really find important, and that we need to remind ourselves of. When you think about disability, do you really think about it? Someone who’s got a full-time trainer or a boxer, someone who’s got a major disability, but who doesn’t let that get in his way, that’s a really good message for someone who is able-bodied. It can make them think, ‘wow, I suppose I could be doing better for myself.” – Idris Elba
◼“Waking up in truth is so much better than living in a lie.” – Idris Elba
◼“We’re all human beings. Experience is experience, let’s just be honest. Let’s not try and dissect suffering into a race, or whatever you want to call it. We’re all human beings, one way or another. All races have gone through times that are challenging; that’s part of being a human.” – Idris Elba
◼“What really excites me in a project is when it goes in a way you haven’t been before.” – Idris Elba
◼“When you come from an underprivileged background, oftentimes, you feel a little overwhelmed by your education or your lack of.” – Idris Elba
“Work hard, sleep less.” – Idris Elba
◼“You always have possibilities.” – Idris Elba
◼“You get a reputation for answering phones, and all they do is ring.” – Idris Elba
◼“You wont know you got to the top until you got there.” – Idris Elba
◼“The other thing I think is important is to keep your head down.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m not afraid to fail. I’m not afraid to fall over and make a mistake. That often cripples people on the onset of getting into anything.” – Idris Elba
More Idris Elba quotes and sayings
◼“Actors tend to not know how their performances are going to actually be used. Even though the script says one thing, in the edit, it can be something else.” – Idris Elba
◼“I find that a lot of actors who are good and open to challenges have lived a full life. When you walk into an audition, you have more to say for yourself because you come from the real world. It’s more enticing for directors, I think.” – Idris Elba
◼“I love to play different roles. That’s just the kind of actor I am.” – Idris Elba
◼“I love working. I’m a workaholic and I’m really privileged for some of the jobs I get offered and so I just want to keep going.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m tactile, very tactile. A woman who has really nice, looked-after skin is such a turn-on for me. It’s always sexy.” – Idris Elba
◼“The audience loves it when you pay attention to details.” – Idris Elba
◼“The less I talk about being black, the better.” – Idris Elba
◼“What really excites me in a project is when it goes in a way you haven’t been before.” – Idris Elba
◼“Africans, we hold on to our youths and whip them into shape.”
◼“Are there differences between black actors’ opportunities and white actors’ opportunities? Yes, there are. It’s been said.”
◼“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.”
◼“As much as it’s nice to step into that massive world of Hollywood and be a big, famous actor, I prefer the career of actors that have really chosen smartly and done really amazing performances. Maybe they’re not as known, but their careers are a bit more interesting.”
◼“Every leading lady I work with, I’ll see if I can get a song out of them and put it on an album.”
◼“Every single film I’ve done, it’s about the character.”
◼“I love bikes. I used to own one, but I fell off it when I was younger and that was the end of my bike riding days until now.”
◼“I try to fit in workouts whenever I can.”
◼“I was always a real athletic kid. Then when I got older, I just figured it was part of life to keep training.”
◼“I was in The Wire for three years, and I left at the highlight of that.”
◼“I was into Spider Man when I was a kid and that was the only comic I’ve ever read.”
◼“I wasn’t bad at school, but I was never a bookworm.”
◼“I would never be fearful of any character.”
◼“I’d rather a young black actor read about success as opposed to how tough it was. I get these roles because I can act and that’s it. Hopefully that’s it.”
◼“I’m a little sheepish about it. Whenever I meet fans and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re so sexy,’ I just don’t get that. There’s no way one man can be universally sexy.”
◼“I’m rebelling against being handed a career, like, ‘You’re the next this; you’re the next that.’ I’m not the next anything, I’m the first me. I can’t be myself, I can’t just be Idris Elba. But that’s just the nature of the business.”
◼“I’m tactile, very tactile. A woman who has really nice, looked-after skin is such a turn-on for me. It’s always sexy.”
◼“I’ve been DJing mostly, and most DJs end up producing. That’s just me.”
◼“I’ve never had to explain ‘Prometheus’ to people, ever. Most people get it.”
◼“I’ m never shaken or stirred.”
◼“In some countries, no one knows who Idris Elba is.”
◼“It’s actually quite criminal how ‘The Wire’ was systematically ignored.”
◼“My Father always told me that a fool at 40 is a fool for life.”
◼“People watch three or four episodes at a time of their shows.”
◼“Television, for me, is a medium that I’m probably always going to be attached to, one way or another.”
◼“The English are good at bad guys – the James Bond-style villain, cunning, slow-burning. The Americans are much more obvious about it.”
◼“The less I talk about being black, the better.”
◼“Waking up in TRUTH is so much better than living in a lie.”
◼“What an honor it was to step into the shoes of Nelson Mandela and portray a man who defied odds, broke down barriers, and championed human rights before the eyes of the world.”
◼“Working at BBC, at the head of one of the top dramas, is a tradition for great actors.”
Idris Elba Quotes About Culture
◼“I lived in America for a long time before I started working as an actor. Some actors show up on set and have never done an American accent before, so they rely on a slew of technical mechanisms. Part of what makes an accent is understanding why people speak that way – you have to understand the culture.”
◼“I’m not interested in making all-black films – I come from a very diverse culture, I want to work with every type of person. I work a lot with women executives because they seem to be a lot more open minded about that and a lot more progressive in that way.”
◼“The one album I can’t live without is called ‘Cumbolo’ by a band called Culture. Every song on their album is deep, but there’s one in particular called ‘This Train.’ I have a tattoo of the lyrics on my left arm.”
Idris Elba Quotes About Opportunity
◼“Are there differences between black actors’ opportunities and white actors’ opportunities? Yes, there are. It’s been said.”
◼“Even when I went to America I didn’t work for four years. It wasn’t like I came to New York and it was the land of milk and honey. It was just as much of a hard graft. But there’s a lot more opportunity nowadays across the board for actors, no matter what color you are, with the Internet and small productions.”
◼“What I like about their films is that you actually feel the momentum of whatever they’re shooting. So, if someone’s falling out a window, it gives the opportunity to show what that might feel like.”
◼“You know, film is the ultimate goal in an actor’s career. I mean, I still love TV. I have my feet firmly stamped in it. But my opportunities have been bigger and better.”
Inspirational Idris Elba Quotes On Success
◼“Don’t just give yourself boundaries!” – Idris Elba
◼“I come from an era, in my world, where you just had to define yourself as who you are and what you do.” – Idris Elba
◼“I knew that if I wanted to be all I could be, I would have to go to the US. It took three years to get the accent right.” – Idris Elba
◼“I love working. I’m a workaholic and I’m really privileged for some of the jobs I get offered and so I just want to keep going.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m an ambitious person. I never considered myself in competition with anyone, and I’m not saying that from an arrogant standpoint, It’s just that my journey started so, so long ago, and I’m still on it and I won’t stand still.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m never shaken or stirred.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m not afraid to fail. I’m not afraid to fall over and make a mistake. That often cripples people on the onset of getting into anything.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’m rebelling against being handed a career, like, ‘you’re the next this; you’re the next that.’ I’m not the next anything, I’m the first me. I can’t be myself, I can’t just be Idris Elba. But that’s just the nature of the business.” – Idris Elba
◼“I’ve always had ambition, and the acting was successful and put my name on the map, but it was never the plan to stop there.” – Idris Elba
◼“It turns out that you make your own luck but you work hard to keep it.” – Idris Elba
◼“Know what your target is, don’t guess it…if you don’t know what your targets are you’re never going to get there.” – Idris Elba
◼“Look whoever you’re talking to in the eyes. Don’t look away. Two reasons: you can tell whether they are lying. Also, so that they can see whatever you’re saying you mean and you can connect to that person.” – Idris Elba
◼“My definition of bad-ass is that I’m a force of nature and true spirit. I’m self-admitting that, and it sounds vain to say that, but I am.” – Idris Elba
◼“My father always told me that a fool at 40 is a fool for life.” – Idris Elba
◼“That’s the thing about people, they always find ways to surprise you.” – Idris Elba
◼“The other thing I think is important is to keep your head down.” – Idris Elba
◼“The problem with a lot of people is that, if they get rejected by a job they want or a person they like, their self-confidence becomes shattered in an instant because they don’t have an abundance mindset. You see when you have an abundance mindset and you get rejected, it’s okay. Because you tell yourself tomorrow I will find 10 other jobs or I will meet 10 other people. You always have possibilities.” – Idris Elba
◼“There are things that I really find important, and that we need to remind ourselves of. When you think about disability, do you really think about it? Someone who’s got a full-time trainer or a boxer, someone who’s got a major disability, but who doesn’t let that get in his way, that’s a really good message for someone who is able-bodied. It can make them think, ‘wow, I suppose I could be doing better for myself.” – Idris Elba
Waking up in truth is so much better than living in a lie.” – Idris Elba
◼“We’re all human beings. Experience is experience, let’s just be honest. Let’s not try and dissect suffering into a race, or whatever you want to call it. We’re all human beings, one way or another. All races have gone through times that are challenging; that’s part of being a human.” – Idris Elba
◼“When you come from an underprivileged background, oftentimes, you feel a little overwhelmed by your education or your lack of.” – Idris Elba
◼“You won’t know you got to the top until you got there.” – Idris Elba
Verdict
Idris Elba is a great source of inspiration and motivation. His words of wisdom and advice can help us to move forward in life and achieve our goals. He is a great example of how hard work and dedication can lead to success. So, if you‘re looking for a little bit of motivation, take a look at some of Idris Elba Quotes. They might just be the encouragement you need to take on new challenges and reach your goals.