IDRIS ELBA is fighting back against accusations that he had “renounced his Blackness”, following an Esquire UK interview in which he said that he had stopped calling himself a “Black actor” as it had limited the types of roles that were offered to him.
In an interview with The Guardian, Elba – a one-time favourite to replace Daniel Craig as the next James Bond – pointed out that he never denied his Blackness, only that he didn’t want to be defined by it. He added that being in the public eye made his opinions more prone to scrutiny and being taken out of context.
In the Esquire UK interview, Elba had said: “I stopped describing myself as a Black actor when I realised it put me in a box. We’ve got to grow. We’ve got to. Our skin is no more than that: it’s just skin.”
One other actor who came to his defence was John Boyega, who called on people to focus on eliminating the stereotyping that actors of colour experienced in Hollywood, which Elba was drawing attention to.
“I think we should fixate on who is typecasting and putting actors in boxes because of this,” Boyega wrote on Twitter. “Not on making weird adjustments for them. We continuously focus on what we have to do so they don’t do this or that.”
Elba himself added to his remarks on his own Twitter account, saying: “Being an ‘actor’ is a profession, like being an ‘architect,’ they are not defined by race.”